Chris Fritz's Blog - Posts Tagged "blogging"

I would be lying if I said the recent covid 19 pandemic hasn't affected my life in any way. When I'm not writing I'm a stand up comedian and all the comedy shows got canceled. That was the biggest bummer of my household. That job did involve a lot of writing so I think it runs parallel with my authorship. I also have a day job that I work at full time. Recently I got cut down to part time do to the pandemic. These two circumstances have given me a lot more time during the day to write. Before the pandemic my life was a precarious balancing act of work, stand up, writing, and somehow playing video games most of the time. With two of these activities pretty decimated it's given me more to write and play video games. I like to think some other authors have been given just as much free time and will use it to write some very compelling pieces of literature. I can say without hesitation that I'll release my second novel ahead of schedule. I wish I could say that the virus itself has inspired me to virus themed story but that is not the case here. From a narrative stand point I think it would be kind of boring to have a virus antagonist as it cannot be seen, heard, smelt, touched, or tasted. But maybe I'm being pedantic. I hope the general populace has had more time to stay inside and read more books. I even tried to sell my first novel by making a Facebook post that said stay inside and read my book so we can flatten the curve. Something like that. Now the only times I can go out into public are for work, groceries and black lives matter protests. With this imperative my next book will be done before I know it and it'll be a rip roaring and curve flattening read. Follow me on twitter if you can @chrisfritzcomic and I'll see you later.

Last December I went to the theatre and watched Star Wars episode 9: the Rise of Skywalker. The so called epic conclusion to the Star Wars franchise. After thinking about it for a long time I realized I dislike this movie quite a lot. It was disappointing to me because I really liked episode eight and wondered how the story would end. I never thought I would be the kind of person to flat out hate a Star Wars movie but it happened. So instead of complaining about it I took a couple of pages and wrote a short summary of how I thought the story for episode 9 should have went. Please read it over and think about what could have been.
In our new version a year as passed after the events of the last Jedi. Rey has grown more powerful with the force as well as dismantled her staff to build a double bladed Jedi lightsaber. We open with a scene on endors forest moon where the resistance has set up a base and gathered a few meager ships to help their cause. The first order attack the base in a relentless onslaught lead by Kylo Ren. The resistance fight honorably but they cannot win. They can only get away as general Leia sacrifices herself to give the resistance ships enough time to get off the planet and warp away to safety. Leia is given the opportunity to talk to her son one last time before Kylo Ren shoves his lightsaber through her heart. The resistance is sent into mourning over the death of Leia. They can barely fight on with what little they have left. They have no choice but to find some more resources to fight the fight. While the resistance brainstorms battle strategies Rey can’t help but recall some stories that she read about the clone wars and how the separatists fought with an army of battle droids. Poe remembers vague rumors of battle droids and droid armies still bouncing around the galaxy. If the resistance could get their hands on a droid army then it would put them back in the game. So their new goal is to see if these droid army rumors have any merit. This puts Poe, Rey and BB 8 on a mission to find Babu Frik and Zori Bliss Poe old pals from his spice running days. Babu and Zori have heard rumors of such an army and the rumors point them in the direction of the junk planet called Kuat. An entire planet that functions as a giant scrap pile filled with droids, robots, weapons and broken ships. Not a soul around that isn’t made of metal. Poe, Rey, BB-8, Zori and Babu travel to this planet and poke around until they find a battalion of functioning battle droids. The battle droids capture the group and they take them to the leader of the droid army a Junker named Frich Dayson. He controls hundreds of thousands of droids and ships electronically. A proper droid army that the resistance needs to continue the war. The group tries to convince the commander of the army to help their cause in the war. It takes some persuading but Frich agrees to help them fight if they pay him 100,000,000 credits. War is an extreme commitment and he could lose a lot more than that. The group doesn’t have the money they need so they have to find a way to get it. So the group hatch a plan and go to Kanto byte the casino planet that is swimming in money. They spend a few days rigging slot machines and hacking gambling computers in order to raise enough money for the army. Their trip ends when they decide to hold up a big time war profiteer who sold weapons to the first order. A really bad guy named Koren the Hutt who made millions. With some of Rey’s force mind tricks they get him to hand over 100,000,000 credits as well as the keys to a hangar full of weapons and ships on an off world moon. Stealing from the bad guys to help the good guys. The group leave Kanto byte and go back to Kuat where they pay Frich Dayson the money. With that the resistance now has a droid army under their command. Meanwhile Finn, Rose and Chewy take the porg infested millennium falcon and go on a mission to find Lando Calrissian. They think he might be able to help out the cause as he was a famous hero from the rebellion. They have a need to sway public opinion in the galaxy about the resistance and try to get more systems to join their cause. They’ve heard chatter that Lando is on Pasaana. Once the group reaches Pasaana the hunt takes them to a local bar where in a cosmic one in a million coincidence they find an old enemy named Dee Jay. The last time Finn and Rose saw Dee Jay he had almost helped them out but betrayed them to the first order. Finn confronts him only to find he still has a nonchalant attitude about everything and refuses to join a side in any fight. Eventually Finn picks a fight with him and starts a bar brawl. The group gets kicked out of the bar and the get arrested by a first order patrol. It isn’t long until the Stormtroopers that arrested them as Finn the first order traitor while the imprison Rose and Chewy the make an example out of Finn. A big platoon of stormtroopers gather in a group and beat him up. Things look hopeless for Finn but with a few good punches and an inspiring speech he convinces some the stormtroopers that they don’t have to listen to the first order. They don’t have to be faceless, nameless, murdering dogs of an unjust regime. The troopers spare his life and release his friends and Finn has recruited a platoon of new troops to the resistance. Finn tells his new recruits that he is on a mission to find Lando and the recruits tell him they had the same mission. The first order sent them on a mission to find Lando and kill him they got so far as discovering his location. He’s hold up in Pasaana’s marshlands with a pack of resistance sympathizers. Those marshlands are nearly impossible to traverse and harder still to flush out an enemy. So Finn, Rose, Chewy and the traitor troopers go into the marshlands waving a flag of peace. They are received by Lando’s men and meet with Lando. They find an old, world weary Lando who has no real will to join this fight. After some inspiring words from Chewy Lando gets the gumption to help out the young whipper snappers. With that Lando and his small group of resistance sympathizers join the fight. Meanwhile Kylo Ren’s spirit has been torn into pieces. He is compelled by the force to destroy the resistance but killing his mother was too far. He starts seeing visions someone or something reaches out to him. It’s the force ghost of Darth Sidious. Telling him to travel to Exegol the ancient home of the sith. He shows Ren where to find a sith way finder the only thing in the galaxy that shows the way to Exegol. Kylo and the knights of Ren go on their campaign to get the way finder and take a ship to Exegol once there Kylo is greeted by the force ghost of Darth Sidious. Sidious guides him around the ancient home of the sith, shares his ancient evil wisdom, and gives him a gift. A counsel of four regents who served lord Sidious in the days of the empire and will serve Kylo Ren as the one supreme ruler of the sith. Sidious also gives Kylo a fleet of star destroyers equipped with weapons that can blow up entire planets in one shot as well as an army of sith troopers. Kylo sends coordinates to general Hux and orders every single ship in the first order fleet to fly to exegol and every single first order troop to join them. Kylo Ren gathers all of his forces for the final battle. Unfortunately general Hux doesn’t like the way Kylo has been running things and when he gets to exegol he tries to assassinate Kylo. Ren is too powerful and sees the attempt on his life coming from a mile away. He kills Hux before Hux can kill him and any whisper of insurrection with in the first order dies with Hux. Kylo is missing something though. The Sith always have the law of two. Kylo needs an apprentice to join him in the ways of the sith. He wants Rey. He still has the ability to communicate with her using the force. He invades her mind on multiple occasions to try to convince her to turn to the dark side. Threatening to kill her and the rest of the resistance if she won’t turn. With his army and his mastery of the force Kylo Ren is the most powerful threat in the galaxy. He will not be denied. Rey tries to reach out to the Jedi of the past for guidance but she finds nothing. Kylo in his ultimate threat shows Rey how to get to exegol using the force so she can join him on the throne of the sith. It’s an obvious trap but the entire galaxy is in danger if Kylo isn’t defeated. Rey shares what Kylo has told her with the resistance. The power he’s gained and the location of exegol. With that the resistance put a plan into motion. They send out a signal that hacks every single hollow viewer in the know galaxy and plays a message on it. The play a heartfelt speech given by Lando about the sacrifices that were made in the past and how the future will be taken from them if they don’t fight the first order. This inspires countless ships from all across the galaxy to join the resistance. The freedom fighters forces grow from maybe a couple dozen ships to hundreds of thousands of ships. A fighting force of that might just be able to stand up against the over whelming might of the first order. They take their droid army, their ships, and everybody else who wants to fight to exegol for the final battle for the soul of the galaxy. The ships engage the fleet of sith star destroyers in the air while Frich Dayson lands his droid army on the ground and starts the ground attack. Battle droids versus storm troopers in an epic battle. Finn and Rey lead the ground battle while Poe fights in the air piloting an X-wing. At a point in the battle Rey and Finn are able to break off from the fight and storm the sith temple. They are met by the Knights of Ren. Skilled warriors who fight for the dark side and they are quite the match for Rey and Finn. Eeventually Kylo Ren shows up. Rey goes off to fight him while Finn takes care of the knights. Rey is determined to defeat Kylo and they start to most epic lightsaber fight imaginable. Their battle with their lightsabers is so epic that the entire planet is rocked by their fight. The two of them use their force abilities to such extreme that at the height of their battle both of them pass out and are mentally transported inside the force itself. In here the Jedi and the sith of the past reveal the true secrets of the force. The jedi of the past try to sway Kylo to the light side of the force and the Sith of the past try to pull Rey to the dark side of the force. The epic lightsaber fight continues inside the force. It only comes to a conclusion when Kylo threatens to kill Rey and convince Finn to join the dark side instead. He can tell that the former storm trooper is force sensitive and things if Rey won’t turn to the sith them perhaps he will. In an overwhelming fit of corrupting anger Rey chops off Kylo’s right hand leaving him crippled and the battle ended. Kylo encourages Rey to kill him. But she does not. Instead Kylo gives up his body to the force and disappears into it. Unable to fight anymore. He spent his life being torn apart by the need to do the right thing until he finally couldn’t fight anymore and he dies. Meanwhile back on the battlefield Babu Frik and Frich Dayson have concocted a virus that will allow Frich to control one of the sith star destroyers. They just need to get BB-8 on to the hull of one of the destroyers to allow Frich to hack into it. A squadron of resistance fighters lands a ship on one of the star destroyers with BB-8 in toe. BB-8 hacks into the star destroyers controls and gives Frich access. The resistance then orders a full retreat. Finn is able to finish of the last of the knights of Ren and adhere to the retreat after grabbing Reys unconscious body. Rey wakes up on a speeder bike being driven by Finn as fast as he can away from any fighting. He gets on a departing ship with the rest of the resistance ground troops and takes off away from the planet. Every resistance ship light speeds away from exegol as Frich Dayson uses his sith star destroyer to blow up the entire planet of exegol. Destroying every trace of the sith and the first order. The resistance has won against the first order. Good has won against evil. Poe Dameron and Lando Calrissian get to work setting up a democratic governing body to govern the galaxy. While Finn tells Rey that he is force sensitive and wants to learn the ways of the Jedi from her. He also admits that he has fallen in love with her and she admits that she feels the same way. The two of them kiss. The End.

Recently Netflix released an independent film from France on their platform called Cuties. It’s been very controversial on the internet and that’s what we’ll be discussing. Let’s start with an overview of the film. It’s about an eleven year old Muslim girl named Amy living in France with her strict religious family. Feeling quite repressed by her conservative mother eventually she meets a group of girls her own age who are part of a twerking dance team. Amy befriends them and they enter a twerking dance contest.

The film has been heavily criticized for it’s sexualization of children. Now when I read all the internet backlash against this movie I couldn’t help but think back to 2019 when everybody talked about the controversy surrounding Joker. While they thought Joker would normalize radical violence this movie would normalize the sexualization of children and pedophilia. There are several schools of thought about how society should relate to movies like these. One is that art is a reflection of society and can be used to reflect the values of the society. That it can teach us things and can have direct impacts on society. In this framework a movie like this would be condemned for its sexualization and it’s through this framework that most of the critics make their criticism. Another school of thought is that art exists outside of society and doesn’t have any impact on it what so ever. We do not get our values and our societal norms from art and instead we get them from the people around us. In this framework cuties is not controversial it’s just a movie that exists. There’s probably a synthesis between these two ideas that can work in real harmony. On a personal level I’m close to that second philosophy where not all art has to instill values or reflect societal norms. I believe art can be offensive and be filled with things that society would hate. I also hold a belief that if there is something that offends you you should look directly at it and understand it more that’s why I watched this movie. Yes I did I watched the whole thing so now I’m probably on an FBI watch list but I have to tell you I hate this movie. Earlier this year I saw the controversy just surrounding the movies poster and I admit that did paint this movie in a bad light for me. The worst part is that in the movie they make that poster move. Even if I hadn’t read all that backlash early on I still think I would have heated this thing. The sexualization is way too explicit and any theme it tries to convey gets drowned in this sexualization. While I think this movie is bad I don’t think it’s dumb. I actually like the end of it where Amy rejects both her twerking dance crew and her religion is probably the best possible ending for this film.

I also watched some interviews with the director and she says that this film is semi autobiographical. It’s definitely drawn from growing up as a Muslim woman in France and that’s a big part of the film. The other part comes from real life instances when she watched young girls doing twerking dance routines and I guess this is supposed to comment on how girls have to grow up in a hyper sexualized society. In the interview she talks about different roles of femininity in society and how they clash with each other. She does create a strict divide between her conservative religious role of femininity and a western sexual ideas of femininity. In the end both ideas are really systems of oppression and control so this movie does have something deep to say unfortunately. To criticize her there were ways to get this point across with a movie where every one of the main characters is over the age of eighteen. I would probably want to watch a movie about a repressed religious eighteen year old Muslim girl grappling with her own sexuality by dancing. That leads me to believe that the director made these characters eleven years old so the movie could be more offensive and that she could create internet backlash getting herself free advertising. So we all fell for it. We’ve been tricked and bamboozled. The only thing we can do now is donate money to organizations that combat human trafficking. That’ll show em all.

Now I don’t want to be all pessimistic here. As far as I can tell this film has two main messages. Society has a corrupting obsession with sex and women’s sexuality and the innocence of children is eroded as the adult world encroaches in on it. Now two good films that tackle these subjects individually they are Showgirls and the Florida Project.

In Showgirls a Las Vegas stripper named Naomi Malone gains fame and fortune but along the way she turns to violence and sleeping with her boss to get to the top. In the film there is gratuitous amounts of full frontal female nudity and all the actors are over the age of eighteen. The film rubs our faces in over the top sex. This satirizes America’s obsession with sex and pornography. It’s completely over the top and campy at times but everyone in the movie is an adult and not a child. In the Florida project a six year old girl named Moonee who lives in Orlando and is extremely poor. She gets into juvenile mischief with her friends culminating in her friends accidentally burning down an abandoned house. In the film Moonee is exposed to several adult activities. At one point she and her friends are solicited by an elderly pedophile. The creepy old man is stopped by Willem Dafoe’s character before anything bad happens. She’s also exposed to adult themes by her mother who takes her with her as she scams random people on the street. They constantly move from motel to motel and at one point her mother brings a random man to their home to prostitute herself while Moonee hides in the bathroom. The child’s innocence is fully destroyed when child protective services shows up and takes her away from her mother. As she’s exposed to more and more adult themes her childhood innocence is eroded and eroded away into nothing. I’d also like to point out that in this movie there are no little girl’s twerking anywhere. So these subjects can be addressed in more subtle and artistic ways. Stuff like this just makes me hate cuties even more.

Also when I think about it more I get kind of pissed that the director would exploit the young girls staring in this movie by sexualizing them. How hypocritical can you be when you try to say that society sexualizes young girls while you are the one really sexualizing young girls? In the end this whole thing is a fucking mess that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. If Cuties is remembered for anything it will probably be all the times it made us cringe whether we saw the movie or not. Netflix might take a big hit for this one but I don’t think it’s the end for them. Goodbye everybody and remember, pedophilia is wrong.

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

Like most of you guys out there I’m a big fan of the Marvel cinematic universe. They’ve given us so many different female characters with exciting backstories and personalities. Like Black Widow who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter, or Captain Marvel who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter, or Gamora who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter, or Scarlet Witch who was captured at a young age and forced to be a badass fighter. Wait a minute. Oh my god they just made the same character four different times! So with repetition like this I asked myself a truly deep question. How can someone create a strong female character and actually have it be a strong female character? More specifically can a strong female character be strong not in spite of being female but because she’s female? In my contemplation on this subject three characters came to mind. They are all from the same TV show and that show is Avatar: the Last Airbender.
As fans of the show know it is filled with really good female characters but right now I just want to focus on three. They are Toph, Katara, and Azula. Three character that got a lot of screen time and were flushed out the most. Let’s start out with talking about Toph. Toph is a twelve year old blind girl and her character is truly a unique departure in the evolution of female characters and comes at writing female characters from a completely new angle. For Tophs character the writers took masculine traits and mapped them on to her. This makes Toph relate to the boys more because she doesn’t play into feminine stereotypes. She rejects things like putting on makeup, doing her hair, and bathing regularly in favor of getting dirty, laughing at bodily functions, using rude language. She rejects the feminine activities and replaces them with masculine actives. Also rejecting traditionally feminine traits in favor of traditionally masculine ones. This is the way I generally see most of the stereotypical strong female characters and it can be an easy path to go down from a writing stand point. At a certain point I do think the strong female character with masculine traits becomes a parody of itself. I can probably think of dozens of strong female characters that fall into this category so if you want an easy way of writing strong female characters this is probably the way to go.
But some people demand more from their strong female characters so let’s move on and talk about Katara. Katara is a unique strong female character because her strength comes from a place that most people wouldn’t see as a place to draw strength from, your mom. Katara displays the strength of a mother. She acts like a den mother to everyone in the group. So much so that Sokka almost forgot the face of his real mother and whenever he tries to think of her he can just see Katara. At some of her most powerful moments she cries out like she is scolding her opponents. In the first episode the inciting incident for the entire series happens because she scolds Sokka. Sounding very much like a mother disciplining her child. At times when the group is mentally and physically exhausted Katara is the only one to hold them together. Like a mother guiding her children. Also in the last episode of season two there’s this one shot where she’s holding Aangs dead body and it invokes the image of Michelangelo’s pieta statue where Katara would be the Virgin Mary the mother of Jesus. Just as Mary was the mother of Jesus so is Katara the mother figure of this group. She is a good example of being strong not in spite of her femininity but because of her femininity. Being a mother is a feminine role and it’s where she draws her strength. I’ve seen very few characters like this so in Katara I find something very unique.
Now let’s take a trip over to the dark side and talk about Azula. Azulas character is an interesting development in strong female characters and it comes from a very dark place. You see in a general sense women have a high capacity for emotional intelligence than men. This means that generally women can recognize their emotions and even control them better than men. In the show we see Katara as a very emotionally conscious character for example. But what if that emotional consciousness turns into emotional manipulation. That is the strength of Azula. There is a time in the show when she gets into a fight with Zuko and doesn’t have to through a single punch. She just dodges and hurls emotionally scarring insults at him until he tires himself out. She repeats this strategy multiple times throughout the show when fighting. She manipulates the emotions of her opponents. Wasting their time, wasting their energy and throwing them out of whack without even touching them. She uses her higher emotional intelligence to manipulate her enemies and her allies. It’s a generally feminine trait that has devastating consequences in this instance. Once again she is not strong in spite of her femininity but because of her femininity.
So what’s the lesson here? I think it’s this. A female character doesn’t have to give up female traits in order to be strong. If you really want to step things up make a female character that’s strength and femininity intertwine with one another. Because women can be feminine and strong at the same time they don’t have to choose between the two. I’ll end this by saying call your mom, she misses you.

This is the post that will kind of sum up my professional endeavors for the year as well as give some insight as to what I’m working on for the year ahead. The first thing I have to say is that I’m sorry. I’ve written my second novel and I wasn’t able to release it before the end of the year. I thought I would have been able to release it before the New Year but the editing process is taking a while. I can say with certainty that my next book titled the Well of Destruction will be out sometime in 2021. I can tell that most people would remember 2020 as a truly awful year. To those people I would say be grateful for the things you do have and know that there will be a tomorrow to make things better. Personally I think I’ve had a very decent year I independently published my first novel and I’m on the way to publishing the second one. But I did experience great loss. I do stand up comedy and do to this year’s calamity all comedy shows I would do, have been canceled indefinitely. It could take years for my local comedy scene to recover from this year. The scene was barely hanging on by a thread before everything happened and this particular economy may never fully recover. So I’ve had to switch to a different creative outlet, one that I can do while social distancing. So all of the energy I would put into writing new jokes now has to go to writing stories. So we’ll see if I ever do stand up again. Now let’s get into what I’m going to do in the New Year. I’m playing around with starting a gaming channel on twitch. I think maybe I’ll try to tell some jokes and play video games as well as maybe get some of my comedian friends to come on with me. If I can ever find the motivation to get that going look out for that. I’m also working on starting a patreon page. So if there’s anybody out there who really likes my novels and wants to read more of them, kicking in a few dollars a month would go a long way to helping out. It might be hard to corner the market for people who are fans of fantasy novelist/stand up comedians but we’ll see how that goes. I have an idea for a special offer on my patreon page. If any of my patrons wants some personalized content for $20 and a subject I’ll write you an original short story. What do you guys think? I’ll keep you posted on how things like that go. So there is a lot of things to look forward to in the New Year. I assure you all that I am extremely far from running out of things to write about. I can’t wait to publish new stuff.

I’ve written a lot about Star Wars. I admire how it’s been around for so long and how many lives it’s touched throughout the generations. A series that has been going on for so many years has had to change in so many ways. Now there’s one way it has changed that evolves one of the ideas that is at the stories very core and that transformation comes in the form of the Mandalorian. Now the basic story of the Mandalorian follows a bounty hunter named Din Djarin who has taken it upon himself to to care for a small child that the fans have affectionately named baby yoda. I don’t think that it’s a stretch to say that this Mandalorian bounty hunter has adopted this little baby and acts as a father to the child. This is contextually significant to the over all story of Star Wars. Now let’s go back to the original trilogy. The plot of the first three movies can boiled down to the relationship between our main character Luke sky walker and his father Darth Vader. The audience can live through and relate to the story through Luke as he grapples with his father. He specifically has to grapple with the sins of his father how Darth Vader committed evils acts the son doesn’t want to follow in the footsteps of the father and go down a righteous path.
The father also tries to corrupt the son as if it were destiny that they were meant to walk the same path. The son ends up redeeming the father and proves that even the most corrupted people can choose to come to the good side. A story as old as time and a good lesson learned by all. Now lets fast forward fourth years in our time but five years in their time and we are given the story of the Mandalorian bounty hunter and his child. The audience is made to relate to Din Djarin as he goes on his adventures and raises his baby. We love to watch the bounty hunter make his way in the world trying to make good choices and mold the child into a good adult. Now on an essential level the relationship between Luke and Darth Vader is the same relationship between Mando and baby yoda. A relationship between father and son but here’s where the evolution is. The viewpoint character has changed from son to father. Luke portrays the son as a protagonist and Mando portrays the father in his own story. In the old days the Star Wars audience was mostly made up of children who could relate to Luke. Identify with this young man and his troubles with his father. They relate to the son.
But time passed and those fans grew up. The fans became more mature and maybe even some of them became parents themselves. So they are in a prime situation to relate to a character that goes through parental drama. So star wars was in a prime position to oblige. Now a perfect character to through into the show is Boba Fett. From what little we’ve seen Boba’s relationship to his father is very vital to him. He follows his father’s path becoming a mandalorian bounty hunter. He wears his fathers armor, flies his fathers ship and does his fathers job. There are even points when he tries to avenge his father’s death. The relationship between Boba and his father is very static and stagnant. Boba tries to be exactly like his father not doing better or taking a different path. Boba and Jango take the same path and their path even ends the same way. They both die fighting. This relationship acts as a foil to the main father son relationships in Star Wars. Boba is not like Luke because he doesn’t feel conflict to change his path. Jango isn’t like Din Djarin because he doesn’t want to radically change his ways for the betterment of his son. One could even say that relationship is the worst case scenario of what a father son relationship can be. Patterns of behavior are repeated throughout the generations. The cycle of violence that encapsulated them both keeps turning and swallowing them up. The end result is degradation and stagnation. Luke and Din Djarin break the cycle of violence that has tried to swallow them up and do damage to their family members. Luke succeeded in this and maybe as the show goes on the Mandalorian will succeed and save baby yoda. This story tells as that a relationship between a father and a son is important. This is the way.

Just as an addition I thought I'd give you guys an update. I've just started my third book in the magic metal war saga. I'm really excited to write this third instalment but some things might get in the way. The Covid 19 pandemic is coming to an end as more people get vaccinated. Things are opening up and getting better. Also my day job has me going back into the office full time so that is definitely going to put a damper on my writing. I'm also getting more opportunities to do stand up so that's also going to take a big chunk of my time. With all this starting up I do have some concerns about being able to finish writing my third book. I'll try to keep you guys updated on how it's going but as many of us have learned the hard way recently the future is impossible to predict.

With myself and my fellow countrymen getting vaccinated against the coronavirus I must say that a significant phase of my life is ending and for better or worse a status quo is returning. With this fact staring me in the face I can’t help but look back on how I spent my time over the past year. I had some highs and some lows. I wrote my second book, I got called an essential worker and then got hung out to dry, I had a coworker who absolutely refused to wear a mask over his nose, I marched in a BLM rally, I voted by mail, and a nurse shoved a cotton swab up my nose. But overall I had a good time throughout the pandemic. When I reminisce about those times I’m probably just going to remember the good stuff. Even with all these good feelings going around I can’t help but feel a little guilty. Because there are a lot of people out there who had an absolutely horrible time during the pandemic and just because my experience was rather bright it doesn’t mean their pain isn’t any less painful. The pandemic has forced me to reflect and reevaluate my life and now I feel like I’m at a crossroads. I’ll have to make some big decisions soon. The pandemic has most likely had massive effects on our society that we still have to understand. There are many things I can say about all this and I think a lot of them were encapsulated by the new comedy special by Bo Burnham called Inside. That’s kind of what I really wanted to talk about. Now over the years no other modern artist has made me feel more emotions than Bo Burnham. He’s made me happy, sad, confused, content, afraid, and unfathomably angry. But when I watched Inside I felt all of those things and more. In this special Bo locks himself in a room for a year and made his entire special in this one room. He really focused on writing his songs, performing them in his one room that he makes into a stage, and turning them into music videos. Watching this special now forced me to reflect on all the different stages of the pandemic. What I felt as an individual and how we felt as a society that was disconnected from each other. It forced me to admit that I was afraid sometimes.

Let me tell you a story. During the summer of 2020 and at the height of the lockdown in my city a band of unhoused people came together and built a tent city on the steps of city hall. City hall was vacant at the time so they weren’t really disturbing anybody. It was a month long demonstration to show the people in my city that there is a housing crisis that must be addressed. So I went down to the tent city to see what all the commotion was all about. I didn’t have anything better to do so why not? So with a mask on my face I took a stroll through the tent city. When I took that stroll I was afraid. There were scores of unhoused people sitting in their tents, people were trying to properly dispose of dirty heroin needles, and there were volunteers gathered to try to get people help. I scurried away from the tent city after only a few minutes. I had to admit to myself that I was afraid. Maybe I was afraid of getting stabbed with a bloody heroin needle but if you think about it most times in life you don’t get stabbed with a bloody heroin needle unless you really piss somebody off. My point is that I was afraid and I had to find out why I was afraid. To wrap up this little aside I think I should add that when Trump didn’t get re-elected it felt like this huge weight was lifted off my shoulders but I digress.

The lighting for the special is absolutely astonishing. No matter what I ever say about Bo Burnham he is a good lighting director. Don’t ever let me say otherwise. Inside is truly a document of a man spending time with himself. A man looking back on what he did in the past and accepting himself, looking at who he is now and coming to terms with himself, and looking to the future to see who he wants to be. That process could be the hardest thing that a man can do in life. There are aspects of it that I find condescending. This guy is basically a millionaire trying to convince us that he has mental illness. One lesson I want to impart is this. Mental illness is a serious problem but if you have a shit ton of money you’re in a better position to deal with it. If you’re a normal person with a normal amount of money going through the same problems you’re going to have a much more difficult time. So whenever Mr. Burnham makes art about mental health issues I really don’t see it coming from a good place. Same thing with the pandemic. If somebody has a shit ton of money then they’re going to be just fine throughout the pandemic. Over all I like to think of Bo Burnham as pop culture’s first YouTuber. He makes silly videos about himself and through ways that most people don’t understand he’s made money at it. Hence my unfathomable anger. Who knows maybe I’m just destined to be this man’s harshest critic. Maybe I’ll talk about him more in the future but who knows.
So here I am in my crossroads. I have a need to make my life better and an extreme lack agency to do so. The last thing I want to do is ask you beautiful readers to do something for me. Talk about the hardships you’ve had over the past year. Feel free to write about it in the comments or just write about it on your individual social media platforms. No matter what story you have to tell your story is valid and deserves to be read.

Goodnight and go read a book.

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.