Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "blog-post"

So I recently joined a platform called Wattpad. For those of you who don't know what it is it's a place where writers can post stories that they have written and for readers to read those fiction stories. I see it as way for people to get exposed to what I've written. Before I joined I heard mixed things about Wattpad. I've heard some people say that it's not a good place to get exposure and I've heard other people say it's a place for poorly written fan fiction. Like really a lot of bad stories are being published there mostly about Harry Potter having sex with Draco. So the question here is why would I join this platform if I heard bad things about it? Well I was listening to an interview with George R R Martin and he was asked to give some advice to new writers. His advice boiled done to before you write a full length novel start out writing short stories and try to get them published in literary magazines. That will give you a better foundation in writing fiction and maybe you'll even build a fanbase. That advice is absolute garbage because literary magazines have essentially dried up and gone the way of the dodo. They were probably popular when Martin was getting his start so advice like that would seem natural for him. Unfortunately times have changed. The internet has risen and changed the way we read. Enter Wattpad. Despite its criticisms to does have a lot of users and it has done its best to create a platform for engaging with users as well as become a place to publish short fiction in an official professional capacity. Nowadays if you want to publish short fiction there are barely any traditional publishing routes to do so. Wattpad might have just well replaced those literary magazines the Martin spoke so highly of. Plus I do feel a freedom of being able to publish any bit of writing I want. That's very appealing to me. The demon monkeys that live in my hair will finally have their message heard. So if I feel I want to start writing about the sex lives of Harry Potter characters then I write to my hearts content. And who knows maybe somebody will enjoy what I've written about the sex lives of Harry Potter characters so much that they'll check out my original works and then I've gained some new fans. Oh well wish me luck and if you're on what pad right now and you want to follow me here's a link https://www.wattpad.com/user/chrisfri...

Till next time
Peace

As most of you know I’m a big fan of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I was really excited when I heard they were making a sequel series called the Legend of Korra. Unfortunately the sequel series didn’t live up to some fans expectations and didn’t get the same critical praise that the first show got. So with the series long wrapped up let’s ask ourselves what went wrong. How could a show that tackled such complex topics such as racism, communism, police brutality, the societal repercussions of advancing technology, religious extremism, civil war, war profiteering, propaganda, anarchism, monarchy, fascism, and PTSD possibly miss the mark this badly. There are little things that happened that I could just pass off as the root of the problem like Nickelodeon cutting their budget, or not having enough episodes to flush out their stories or being generally disrespected by their network. But I think the problem goes deeper than that.
I think it’s this the Legend of Korra punishes the fans of the first show for liking the first show. It all started in the first season. The villain Amon uses a technique to take away a person’s bending. A technique that the audience had seen in the previous show by Aang in the final episode of the series. He used it for good and to save the world but Amon used it for evil. It was twisted for nefarious purposes. The first time I watched Amon use it on the show I was devastated that something so sacred could turn into something evil. The audience was being punished for connecting to that technique from the original show. The next part of this comes in season three. The next thing that gets inverted is the nation of Airbenders.
Going back to the original show we actually learned very little about the air nomads. We were told that they were a nation of monks who loved meditation, spirituality and pacifism. They had vegetarian diets and great senses of humor. Their genocide was a tragedy but we learned about them through Aang. What little we learned we could deduce that the air nomads where nice people. Fast forward to season three of Legend of Korra and we are introduced to Zaheer. A villain who was given the power of air bending and he was well versed in the philosophy of the air nomads. This villain takes the philosophy and goes off the edges with it. He turned the Airbender philosophy of freedom and turned it into anarchy. He imposed this anarchy onto the world by assassinating world leaders and trying to kill Korra. Everything the audience loved about the airbenders and subsequently about Aang was twisted by this villain and turned rotten. Once again the show is punishing the audience for liking what happened in the original show.
My last piece of evidence is the biggest. It has to do with something that Niche would call the death of god. On the original show Aang traveled all over the world. Almost everywhere he went he could tell people that he was the avatar and people would love him. They would respect his authority and help him in any way they could. Even though they hadn’t seen the avatar in over 100 years they loved him and he gave people hope. Needless to say the audience parroted this sentiment and favored the avatar. Knowing the avatar is a special savior whose authority is respected. Now all throughout the legend of Korra this belief in the avatar is slowly eroded away. With every villain Korra faces her authority as the avatar is dwindled slowly but surely. Amon came in the beginning and convinced a large portion of the population that benders are evil and the avatar is the ultimate evil. When President Reiko takes power in republic city he doesn’t do anything to help Korra at all. He doesn’t recognize her authority. Unaloc tries to replace her and turn himself into the dark avatar. This true death of god metaphor is ilustated when Unavaatu tears down that giant statue of Aang in the bay of republic city. When the spirit vines take over republic city the entire city blames the avatar and her approval ratings go down to single digits. At this point the entire city hates her and Rieko kicks her out. Later on the earth queen puts a bounty on her head just for doing the right thing. Essentially the entire earth kingdom hates her.
When she goes away for three years the world essentially moves on from her. The average world citizen doesn’t think the world needs the avatar and Kuvira convinced all of her followers of the same. So watching this series is like slowly watching the god and savior of the fandom die. Even Korras duties to the world fade away. The avatar is supposed to be the bridge between the physical world and the spirit world but when she opened the spirit portals she doesn’t need to bridge them anymore. She combined them into one world. The avatar is supposed to have connections to their previous incarnations to access the wisdom of the past. But when she went through harmonic convergence she lost her connections to her previous lives. She’s supposed to be able to bend all the elements but by the end of the series the military has mech suits that can spit out fire and lightning bolts. It starts to become possible that even non benders can gain the powers of the avatar using enough of their advanced technology. By the end of the whole thing the audience could question what being the avatar even means. With all this it does kind of alienate the audience that fell in love with the last Airbender and maybe it had a hard time gaining a new audience at the same time. But what do you guys think? Is the legend of Korra a misunderstood masterpiece or did it fail to live up to the expectations of the last Airbender?

This post is about a movie called Run Hide Fight. This movie is controversial in a million different ways and unfortunately it tangentially involves me. The plot and premise of this film is very simple. It’s basically die hard in a school. Shooters attack a small town American high school and it’s up to one heroic student named Zoe to stop them and save the day. Seems pretty simple enough. A movie like that can be controversial for its dramatization of school shootings. A real life tragedy that has happened quite a lot in America. With all that in mind I’ve watched the movie so you don’t have to so review it. This movie was very hard to watch. Not only because I pirated it but because the violence in the movie is very graphic so it’s not something to watch with the kids. It’s hard to watch in the same way that Schindler’s list or American history X are hard to watch. Unlike those movies Run Hide Fight is not good. It spends most of its run time seesawing from graphic violence to cringey edge lord humor that makes the whole thing more awkward then it needs to be. There are four students in this story that do all the shooting and play the part of the villains. They consist of a big dude with a shaved head who exhibits symptoms of schizophrenia, a suicide girl who dresses like she robbed a hot topic and puts on flawless make up for committing acts of terrorism, a dorky kid with frizzy hair who admits he’s been bullied and that’s his reason for shooting everyone, and their fearless leader who is a teenage copy and paste of the joker and wants to shoot everybody so he can get likes on social media. Now the hero of our story Zoe is actually a pretty decent character. The only problem I have with her is that she constantly talks to hallucinations of her mother who died from cancer. Mourning a loved one is a serious thing but this movie acts like the fact that this girl is going through the mourning process makes her emotionally dead inside and that somehow this gives her the emotional fortitude that she needs to kill the bad teenagers that are shooting up her school. Personally there are times when I can’t stop laughing about how dumb and awkward this movie is but I don’t think most people who watch this will laugh as much as me.

Now that we’ve talked about that there is even more controversy surrounding this movie. Mostly focusing on its production and release. It was make by a company in Dallas Texas called Cinestate it focuses mostly on making right wing or conservative movies targeted at right wing audiences. The company faced accusations of abusing its employees with long hours and hazardous work environments. This movie’s production also saw some cases of animal cruelty and one of the co-producers of this film named Adam Donaghey was arrested in April 2020 for the sexual assault of an underage girl. So there’s not a lot to be happy about here. Critics absolutely hate this movie. It has bad scores on rotten tomatoes and Meta critic. It premiered at an Italian film festival in 2020 after its film festival run it didn’t get picked up by major distributors. That is until earlier this year it got a deal to be distributed by a site called the Daily Wire. For those of you who don’t know the Daily Wire is a conservative propaganda site founded and run by a Mr. Ben Shapiro. They’ve promoted this film as a conservative right right wing movie for conservative right wing Americans. Now personally I believe the daily wire and Mr. Shapiro are a danger to society but I don’t think this movie is a danger to society. I also don’t really believe this movie fits in well with the right wing conservative media agenda.

So where do I fit in with all of this? I have met the man who wrote and directed this movie and I’m currently friends with him on facebook. His name is Kyle Rankin and I actually worked for the guy for a brief moment on his previous film called the Witch Files. A really great watch if you like found footage movies and magic. So I’m not sure how exactly how to feel about this. Maybe the film industry makes strange allies of the most unlikely of people. Maybe I don’t know Kyle as well as I thought and he is just more than happy to make crap and be a fertilizer salesman. So who knows maybe Kyle Rankin and Ben Shapiro would disagree on a lot of things or maybe I and Kyle Rankin would disagree on more things. Truth be told I’m kind of pissed off. I hate Shapiro’s guts and now on a professional level I’m one degree away from him. Woe is me, woe is me. If some resolution to this ever dawns on me I’ll tell you guys about it. Just know that this situation is messy and life is messy as well. I’m not done talking about this and sometime soon I’ll post part two of this professional snafu and maybe I’ll find some more answers.

Thanks guys

Hey what's up everybody. I got some really good news to share with you. Just in time for the holidays I'm happy to announce that I'm offering hardcover versions of both of my books. The Universe Key and the Well of Destruction. I am so excited for this. Now my first two books can be enjoyed in long lasting hardcover versions for all the readers out there that prefer reading hardcover. I am so grateful for this opportunity to make hardcovers. Now I'm going to be honest with you guys these new versions are a little bit pricier than I'd like to admit. Printing costs really got me in a bind. So I'm going to give you something else. I am slashing prices on the paperback versions of both the Universe Key and the Well of Destruction. Now is the best time to get the paperback versions. I am so excited to be offering all of this. Here's the amazon links to check out my new hardcover versions today.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09HQ95Z5D

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09JF22JSD

Looking back at all the movies I saw in 2021 I made an extraordinary discovery that my notion of storytelling to its very core. To demonstrate this notion I’m going to have to write about my favorite movie that came out in 2021 and my least favorite movie that came out in 2021. So let’s follow along and see if we can learn something.

The worst movie I saw in 2021 was Marvel’s the Eternals. Going into the movie I knew it had a bad rotten tomatoes score but I still wanted to see it. Right now I’m going to have to agree with the critics and say this movie was a swing and a miss. It feels strange because I am deep into the marvel cult and I know very little about the Eternals. I hoped for the best but I was disappointed. Maybe studying this movie for a little bit can teach us an important lesson. Here’s what I really believe. The Eternals is the complete antithesis of everything that makes marvel movies good. It takes everything that gives marvel success and runs in the complete opposite direction. Let’s start at the beginning with the characters. One staple of the MCU is making movies with big casts of unique characters. Some of the best examples would be the first Avengers movie and Infinity War. One of the reasons those movies are so good is that they don’t introduce us to new characters. They take almost all the characters from previously established movies and focus on the characters just interacting with each other. In Eternals they introduce us to ten new main characters, and this is the first time the audience is seeing any of them. So, this movie has to spend a good chunk of its run time introducing all these characters. It just fails to keep all these characters unique and interesting. Now right now you might be saying to yourself that there’s an exception to this rule. Guardians of the galaxy introduces us to an ensemble of new characters and it’s one of marvels greatest movies. That’s because that movie has a very strong plot which is the next thing I want to talk about, the plot. Now the plot of guardians of the galaxy is pretty straight forward. Here’s a powerful McGuffin all these characters have to play keep away with it for two hours. The plot of Eternals has so much deep lore, mysteries, magic, and plot twists that it’s enough to make anybodies head spin. There’s so many layers to this plot that it all just gets lost in the sauce. My final point is the probably the most important criticism I can levy against the movie and that is this movie doesn’t have good themes. To understand the themes of this movie you just need to understand the bad guys plan. A celestial god wants to destroy the earth and give birth to a new celestial who will in tern create new worlds across the galaxy giving life to trillions of sentient beings. (Spoiler alert) They want to trade the lives of everyone on earth for the lives of all these potential beings. If that sounds familiar to you it’s because that’s the theme of Avengers infinity war. Thanos wanted to trade the lives of half the universe so the other half could flourish. The Eternals just recycled that theme and the characters spend a good chunk of the film debating weather or not they should even save humanity. I moral dilemma that has already been solved by the previous avengers movies. So Eternals is really a bitter tasting mess that does not belong in the MCU and would probably feel more at home in the DCEU.

Now to review a film that I thought was one of the best from 2021 and that is a movie called Don’t Look Up. For those of you who haven’t seen it it stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of scientists who discover a meteor that will collide with earth and destroy all life on the planet and they have to convince people to do something about it. Now for several years I’ve debated with myself about whether or not satire is a dead art form. Is it possible to satirize society and make jokes about our culture? Ever since the election of Donald Trump I think it’s become harder to do that. Mostly because with him we’ve ushered in the post truth era I think a side effect of this is a fracturing of culture into several different sub cultures that hold different beliefs and recognize different truths. So with all these fractured sub cultures how can someone truly satirize culture? The answer is Don’t Look Up. Let me explain. In the film the giant meteor that is headed to earth is an obvious comparison to climate change. So the audience can spend the entire movie comparing the disaster in the real world to the disaster of the fake world. The only thing that is consistent between the two is how humanity responds to the disaster. One major lynch pin of this movie is the fact that it does criticize the responses towards the meteor. But it doesn’t criticize the actions of everyday individuals. Instead it criticizes systems of production and consumption that envelop those individuals. Systems that envelop entire cultures and sometimes entire communities. So how does all of this relate to satire? Earlier this year Dave Chappelle released a stand up special called the closer and was immediately criticized for transphobic jokes. Now some people might argue that the jokes he told weren’t transphobic but here’s why I think a lot of people thought they were. In Dave’s jokes about the LGBTQ community he probably thought he was commenting on society in some way. And in a way he was but in a much bigger way he’s criticizing one subculture from the perspective of a different subculture. Subconsciously putting the African American culture up against the LGBTQ subculture. He also acts like these are two completely different factions that don’t have any way to cross over to each other. So I guess that’s why I think Dave Chappelle was thrown into the grinder this year. The guy is the greatest comic but maybe that means we should hold him to high standards. So my question still stands. Is it possible to satirize society? After all of this time I have to say the answer is yes but satire is going to look a lot different from now on. Now I guess the biggest thesis of Don’t Look Up is stated in the beginning minutes of the movie. When it just displays the text of a joke that reads like this. When I die I want to die like my grandpa peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like his passengers. This movie criticizes a lot of real world events and people. From politicians like Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton to billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. So I guess in this framing this satire is trying to tell us that these billionaires are the grandpa that died in his sleep and the entire earth are the passengers. In the end I think this movie is a good example of a great story. It’s a fantasy that can tell us more about ourselves than real stories ever could. Now my one criticism of the movie is that comparing climate change to a giant earth shattering comet doesn’t line up completely. Climate change is of course slow and manmade while a comet is a sudden cosmic anomaly. But it’s still a decent movie if you want to watch excellent acting get a few chuckles and also have a slow anxiety attack.

Now there’s something very amazing that happens when you compare Eternals and Don’t Look Up and that is this. They are the exact same movie but they go in completely opposite directions. Both movies are about a small group of people trying to save the world from total destruction. They both contemplate humanity, society, and nature and they both encounter god like beings that want to wipe out humanity. Both of these narratives question if humanity is worth saving and they come up with different answers. In Eternals they save the world in Don’t Look Up they don’t save the world. So let’s go over the process by which each movie comes to their own conclusion. In Eternals it runs the gamut of all human history and focuses on all the deadly weapons mankind has created. All the death and destruction of entire cultures and civilizations. But it does ground itself in a romantic humanism that always wins out in superhero movies. While Don’t Look Up does a deep dive into contemporary culture and forces us to look at our everyday contradictions. Just little things that we think or believe that are ultimately harmful to us. Things we’ve normalized that might harm us down the road. It could be the way we communicate, the way we produce, the way we consume, or even the way we reproduce. We can find harmful contradictions in all of them. Just maybe all of those contradictions add up to a point where we can’t help ourselves anymore. That leads me to something that I have believed for most of my life and that is this. Inside of every bad movie there is a good movie just trying to get out. So think of this when you’re reading, writing or creating. Sometime the difference between something good and something bad is just a few decisions.

I did find it interesting that two movies can be released in the same year and be about the same thing even though they’re different genres and styles. I’m very interested about stories that are apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic so I might write more about those in the future. But what do you guys think? Am I on to something here or am I completely out in left field. Let me know in the comments.

I hate Batman's eyes. Over the years Batman has been adapted for the big screen several times and one thing that has remained consistent with every iteration is the eyes of the bat suit. What do I mean by this? Whenever we see Batman he has a suit that makes the majority of his body look like a bat but when we look at the eyes of the bat suit they are the eyes of a human. You're probably thinking to yourself as opposed to what eyes exactly? Here's the alternative. In Batman the animated series whenever he puts on his suit his eyes turn into white slits. that's how batman's eyes look in the majority of his comic book appearances and all of his animated incarnations. The movies however still have a caped crusader that looks nothing like this. What do we lose with this. Well if we look at human eyes that tells us that Batman is really just a man underneath that costume. If we look at two white sectioned off slits in the mask that gives him more of an inhuman look. he could strike more fear into the hearts of his enemies. So much of the batman mythology centers around him becoming more than a man. Surrendering his humanity and ascending to the status of symbol, of myth. With human eyes he still retains his humanity but with inhuman eyes he becomes so much more. That's a small visual representation that the movies have missed. To more solidify my point in the Spiderman movies from the early 2000's the eyes on the Spiderman suit look true to the comic books and nothing like human eyeballs. So it was done in a film that was better able to encapsulate the superhero trope of becoming superhuman and accomplish everything I'm talking about. So why do I care about this? I believe that it was Edgar Allen Poe that said eyes are the windows to the soul. That is extremely true for our favorite movies. If we see a characters eyes we can see there humanity and their soul. Conversely if we don't see a persons eyes then this character becomes so much more than a character. Certain characters like Robocop and judge dread wear dressings that cover their eyes. This is a step that removes them from humanity and makes them incarnations of cold, hard justice. In Star Wars when we look at Darth Vader and the storm troopers they wear masks that cover their entire face removing their humanity almost entirely becoming representatives of evil and death. I'll just touch on Boba Fett briefly saying that he is one of those characters that is removed from humanity because we do not see his face. I think back in the day what made fans love him was how little we interact with him. His limited screen time gives him an air of mystery around him. And in that mystery fans were able to imprint whatever they felt on to that character. Some fans could think of him as a cowboy others a knight others a bounty hunter. The possibilities were endless. So this is a cry to have Batman fall in line with other interesting characters in the cinematic tradition. It's a concept that I've yet to see live action batman embrace and it especially was absent in the most recent film with Robert Pattenson. There is some hope on the horizon though. There was a live action film that portrayed this eyeless Batman for me. In Batman V Superman dawn of justice Batman wears a mech suit for his fight with the son of krypton and this mech suit sports pale blue glowing eyes. They are a perfect representation of what I'm talking about and I hope they pick up on it in future films.

I might as well give you a personal update while I'm here. I do have to admit that my writing process has hit a snag. I've gone through a very big change in my life. I've gotten a new day job that's really started to take a good chunk out of my day. I know it's for the better but it's made me rearrange and reevaluate things in my life. So don't feel sorry for me feel glad for me. I definitely have been keeping myself busy right now I'm working on a project that could change everything in my life. So stay tuned for some amazing news.