The Gaming Den

Saw Black Panther. It was good. Would spend money to see it again.

Black Panther was fucking awesome.

It was. I'm super hopeful for the generation of black kids who see it and go into fashion or tech, because I want those designs to be real.

I thought Black Panther was amazing as well, for the most part; I liked that it was a smaller-scale, more self-contained movie like Ant-Man was, the better to introduce a relatively obscure character to new audiences. I did have a big issue with some of the character motivations, though.

We have W'Kabi, T'Chala's second-in-command, who was ostensibly a good friend of T'Chala and loyal to him personally. And we have Okoye, leader of the Dora Milaje, who was, as she said, loyal first to the Wakandan throne and whoever sat in it. They build up W'Kabi's trust and familiarity with T'Chala and Okoye's dedication to duty in the first part of the movie, so it seemed as though when the inevitable coup occurred occurred in the second act W'Kabi would support T'Chala and Okoye would support Killmonger.

And then when push comes to shove...W'Kabi suddenly turns on T'Chala and is all "Screw tradition, let's conquer the world!" after a single less-than-successful mission on T'Chala's part, with only a single sentence about thinking he would be different than his father to indicate dissatisfaction with him and his views, while Ms. Duty-Above-All has the entire Dora Milaje betray Killmonger to support T'Chala after specifically rebuking Nakia for even thinking she would choose T'Chala over the rightful king of Wakanda?

I can't be the only one thinking that was a very sudden change in attitude and motive on both their parts that seemed to come out of nowhere just for the sake of being unexpected. The Dora Milaje fighting for T'Chala at least makes some sense given that he says he never yielded, since that would technically make the outcome of the honor duel invalid and I think I recall Okoye saying something along those lines, but W'Kabi falling in line with Killmonger's plans in a very Izma-in-The-Emperor's-New-Groove "Welp, he ain't gettin' any deader" sort of way rang very hollow.

If they had to have one friend support T'Chala and one oppose him, I think it would have made much more sense if they stuck to their original positions, with T'Chala's security force fighting for him and the Dora Milaje fighting for Killmonger, and would have been more impactful too--W'Kabi feeling frustrated with T'Chala apparently following in his father's footsteps but seeing signs of change and hoping that his friend will do the right thing, and Okoye hating to fight against T'Chala & Co. due to her friendship and sympathy with them but doing so anyway because she feels that honoring the succession is best for Wakanda.

But it would have made even more sense for both of them to back T'Chala (or at least stay out of things) and have Killmonger draw his support just from the other tribes' leaders in the council, who didn't appear to care about T'Chala personally and would be more justified in going for a greedy power grab and/or sucking up to the new king, and have them provide him with soldiers and weapons in lieu of the security forces and Dora Milaje. Not to mention that putting the focus on all the tribes enthusiastically supporting Killmonger would make the fact that M'Baku's tribe supported T'Chala when M'Baku had the most legitimate grievances against him all the more poignant.

I definitely enjoyed the movie. I brought my 10-year-old daughter who also really enjoyed it. She thought it was a good adventure movie. Not only was it a good movie, we both agreed that it was an important movie. As bold as racial supremacists have begun, I am happy that a major movie featuring a black protagonist and primarily black cast has seen widespread acceptance. So any quibble I have falls largely in line with Emerald. Like so many movies today it hits some points decently, but you know they COULD have done better.

The thing that I think could have been handled better was the Killmonger/T'challa ideological evolution. T'Challa accepts that Wakanda could have done more and essentially concedes that Killmonger is right in principle but wrong in response (ie, extreme violence is not required). Since the question of 'justified violence' is pretty important, I think that Killmonger having agreed to an alliance with T'challa would have been somewhat more interesting. Now, superhero movies always have to defeat the 'enemy', but I think the character was compelling enough that I didn't really want to see him removed from the MCU. Even having him defeated and make some statement like 'I'm going to be watching you, and if you don't make a difference, I'm going to take you down' would be interesting. That'd put T'Challa in the position of trying to appease traditionalists but also make a difference in the larger world.

What I hated about Black Panther is that such a film was in any way revolutionary in this day and age.

The two things I absolutely loved about the Black Panther movie are the framing and the ideological message of the script.

The framing is genius scripting. The first line in the animated intro is the child's voice asking "Tell me a story of home" to start the telling of the creation myth relevant to the movie. And the last line of the movie proper is a child asking the Hero "Who are you"? . These two questions are really directed at the viewer. Using them to bookend the film subtly echoes and reinforces the roles of history and myth as the fundamental foundations in the construction of identity

The ideological message is superlative for this sort of movie. The actual emotional climax of the film comes before the final showdown with the villain. The character writing and wonderful performance by Michael B Jordan make quite clear that Erik Stevens is a monster whose desire for vengeance will can only lead him perpetuating oppression:"but this time we're gonna be on top". But the script also makes abundantly clear that his is a justified desire for vengeance. If you're reading inside the spoiler tags you already know the big strokes of his beef with the royal line of Wakanda and colonialism -- and how his arguments are compelling enough that #teamkillmonger is a real-world hashtag --but you may have missed the many ways the film reinforces this.

Lemme digress into names for a minute: He was born N'Jadaka - yet that name, the name from the story of home, was erased and as a fatherless American child he is merely Erik Stevens. He later earned the nickname Killmonger - to the viewer that may at first seem just a lazy shorthand way of saying "this guy likes to kill, he's a bad guy get it?" but within the context of the work it's a new name that he earns for himself by killing for the US Military. "Started calling him Killmonger. He joined a JSOC ghost unit, now these guys are serious, they would drop off the grid so they could commit assassinations and take down governments" There is no clearer way for a work of fiction to signify a change in identity than to change a character's name - so Killmonger's character biography indicates that the only way he was able to construct his adult identity was to become a lethal tool of colonial oppression. That is all he knows, that is who he has become, because otherwise he would just have been erased, as the name N'Jadka is from almost all of the reviews of the film so far. And he continues to function that way -- using the training the US govenment gave him to destabilize Wakanda and trying to claim the name Black Panther for himself in a wonderful metaphor for how the ideology of liberation is itself subsumed into continued oppression.

The true turning point of the film is T'Challa accepting that N'Jadka's grievances are not merely legitimate, but serious enough to outweigh tradition and the true emotional climax of the film is when T'Challa tells his ancestors "You were wrong. All of you, you were wrong!" and decides to return to the world of the living to right this. This philosophical rejection of a tradition of an ethno-state maintaining nationalist isolationism is fully as important to the message of the movie as is the later physical defeat of Killmonger's mongering of kills. The film rejects both non-intervention and also violent revolution. It is non-intervention that allowed the tragedy of N'Jadka / Erik Stevens / Killmonger and it was violent revolt that Killmonger nearly used to destroy the utopia of Wakanda. This sets up the final scene of the movie, where T'Challa begins down the correct path of projecting soft power to improve the world and provides the kid playing basketball in the present day with tools the kid can use to construct an identity which will not be just another violent tool of oppression. And the film itself hopes to be enough of a myth of home to allow the kids in the audience to construct positive identities

Josh_Kablack wrote:utopia of Wakanda

I have a massive issue with this statement. For all its technological development, Wakanda has political development of a primitive tribe. Its leader can be challenged by anyone, so might absolutely makes right (and there's no particular reason to assume this doesn't trickle down to other positions), it's not a secular country, it has enforced gender roles (women can't be leaders). Wakanda is very far from being a utopia.

Josh_Kablack wrote:What I hated about Black Panther is that such a film was in any way revolutionary in this day and age.

Was it though? Aside from being a Hollywood production with primarily african-american cast, what's so revolutionary about it?

Longes wrote:I have a massive issue with this statement. For all its technological development, Wakanda has political development of a primitive tribe. Its leader can be challenged by anyone, so might absolutely makes right (and there's no particular reason to assume this doesn't trickle down to other positions), it's not a secular country, it has enforced gender roles (women can't be leaders). Wakanda is very far from being a utopia.

1) Except that aside from the exact moment of transition between monarchs, he can actually just never ever ever ever ever accept challenges, and be the leader.

2) You can clearly see that might doesn't make right, because the very few people who are allowed to challenge make the decision not to challenge in part because they respect him for non might reasons. Saying "you should probably have your people respect their king, because if they don't better to have resistance openly in a fairish setting, then to try to undermine the state as a whole" it's not the best possible system, but it's not might makes right.

3) There are plenty of woman leaders, proportionally more than say, the United States, without addressing history because we don't know it, in the present day one of the 5 tribes is headed by a woman, the general of the royal army is a woman, the most authoritative and leader military position in the entire country, the head of the tech division is also a woman. The eldest child seems to inherit the crown by default, but it was made clear that daughters can also inherit, not just sons, so there is potential for a queen.

Oh the 9ish leadership positions, head of military, head of spiritual shit, head of tech, head of state, and head of 5 tribes, women hold three of those roles.1/3rd isn't total equality, and head of state is worth more than the others on probably any scale, but women can be head of state and 1/3rd is more than the current US by a wide margin.

4) Their system is not "primitive" tribal at all, it's easily as complex and advanced as a modern nation state. It's not a democracy, but to call it primitive is to be factually wrong.

Longes wrote:

Josh_Kablack wrote:What I hated about Black Panther is that such a film was in any way revolutionary in this day and age.

Was it though? Aside from being a Hollywood production with primarily african-american cast, what's so revolutionary about it?

You would only say that if you truly had no idea how awful the racism in the States really was.

Other people here could probably put this more eloquently, but...

It's more than just having a black cast and crew. The film depicts a black hero as a hero, not as a side character or the white guy's friend (see Warmachine and Falcon, fer instance). It gives a positive, non-stereotypical view of Africa and Africans, and a positive, main-stream role model for African-American children to look up to and emulate that isn't some variation of Angry Black Guy (which, by the way, is what Blade was, to tie it back to that pic you posted).

kaelik wrote:The eldest child seems to inherit the crown by default, but it was made clear that daughters can also inherit, not just sons, so there is potential for a queen.

Fun fact, in the comics, T'Challa's sister Shuri does in fact become queen and take up the mantle of Black Panther.

Longes wrote:Was it though? Aside from being a Hollywood production with primarily african-american cast, what's so revolutionary about it?

The tragedy is that being a big-budget major studio picture with an majority African-American cast and director is not merely noteworthy but actually revolutionary in 2018's 'Murika.

I'd argue that Black Panther falls under the general umbrella of utopian sci-fi even if ultimately the moral of the story is that Wakanda is an ivory (hurr) tower that needed to reevaluate its place in the world.

The movie is especially important to me as people from the neighborhoods I'm from are not the kind to be interested in comics and I have many many memories of being ostracized for enjoying them. Now even my sister who had long eyed me wearily for my 'nerdy' pursuits got excited about and even dressed up for what would have been a 'nerdy' film in the past.

Something that gets me a lot of hate for saying, but fuck it, this has been happening over the past two decades MGuy as nerd culture is becoming more and more mainstream, something I've seen more as 'normies' invading our sanctuary (at least I saw it as sanctuary) from them when we were ostracized for our interest in this stuff. Tabletop gaming, sci-fi, comics, video games.

Eh. It doesn't bother me. Despite the odd looks and outright fights it earned me in school I never really attached my identity to my hobbies. They've always been things I've done for my entertainment not really a safe place for me to feel special.

It used to bother me, but As people get more and more gatekeepery about nerd stuff, I just... I've gotten over it. Like, I got shit for being a nerd, but if Rick Hayden from High School is super into Captain America now, or whatever, it doesn't affect me at all, its not like I'm going to fucking run into him at the comic shop, and if I do, it's not like anyone's forcing me to socialize with him. So who the fuck cares?

Pariah Dog wrote:Something that gets me a lot of hate for saying, but fuck it, this has been happening over the past two decades MGuy as nerd culture is becoming more and more mainstream, something I've seen more as 'normies' invading our sanctuary (at least I saw it as sanctuary) from them when we were ostracized for our interest in this stuff. Tabletop gaming, sci-fi, comics, video games.

The reason you get hate for that is that it makes you sound like a shitty gate keeper. I personally never saw my hobbies as my identity or sanctuary, it was just things I found fun. People that gave me shit for that...I just never gave a shit about their opinion. I can understand that perception of the invasion, besides the fact that video games were mainstream, fell out around the crash, and then is coming back, but that's seems to me to be quite irrational.

Pariah Dog wrote:Something that gets me a lot of hate for saying, but fuck it, this has been happening over the past two decades MGuy as nerd culture is becoming more and more mainstream, something I've seen more as 'normies' invading our sanctuary (at least I saw it as sanctuary) from them when we were ostracized for our interest in this stuff. Tabletop gaming, sci-fi, comics, video games.

I've met people who were bullied by people for liking things and now their bullies are fake nerds on social media, so I understand the concern. I mean most of have tabletop gaming viewpoints that make us hateful gatekeeping nerds on larger gaming sites.

Also America (the whole anglosphere?) utterly despises nerds, nerds are always the enemy and the sheeple who make up your enemy political party are always nerds while you're the cool kid who defies labels.

What cheeses me is the folks who just go "STAN LEE DO EBERYFING LOL" I fucking hate how that nephew of the owner gets the spotlight over all the actual writers and artists Marvel paid peanuts.

OgreBattle wrote:I mean most of have tabletop gaming viewpoints that make us hateful gatekeeping nerds on larger gaming sites.

Yeah. Been run out (not quite with torches) out of my last gaming group for that after trying to explain that the monk actually sucks cock, and he sucks twice as much in point buy because you're spread so thin MAD-wise you can see daylight through him. The DM had a hard-on for the concept of monks with the bad-ass kung-fu.

https://www.gog.com/movie/ink

This is a nice movie.

Ink is probably one of my favorite indie films. There's just something so sincere about it.

The scene where the father is walking down the hospital corridor completely unaware of the literal battle for his soul going on around him on a different layer of reality just gets me for reasons I can't even adequately explain.

I just watched DAS BOOT in the 5 hours version in a dark, smelly, badly ventilated warm room . . i'm gonna go sit on the balcony for a bit now x.x

Stahlseele wrote:I just watched DAS BOOT in the 5 hours version in a dark, smelly, badly ventilated warm room . . i'm gonna go sit on the balcony for a bit now x.x

Hah, reminds me of watching Blade Runner at a drive-in in the rain. Immersive, but not the best experience.

I Kill Giants was a good movie. My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It's on VOD and has a limited theatrical run.

On the subject of shitty nerd gatekeeping. I don't get it.

I have a couple of friends that used to do videos where they would make cocktails and review comics. Shitlord youtubers accused them of being bored housewives who got off on being fake nerds. Even if that were the case, which it's not, they're now reading some awesome comics each month and isn't THAT the whole point?

Like does it matter whether someone discovered Sonic Youth by going to piss soaked underground venues in the 80's, or if they heard a track on Guitar Hero? No. The important thing is they like Sonic Youth and now I have something to talk to them about.

To the extent that nerd gatekeeping can be justified, it's in a resistance to nerd poseurs, people who have adopted a sub-culture as a fashion statement and thus lack even a cursory understanding of the subject material they're aping. Musically, they're people who wear a band's t-shirt and claim to have gotten it from a concert when their understanding of the band is limited to a skim of their Wikipedia article. Nerd poseurs specifically are a more recent phenomenon, but the basic concept is decades old.

Poseurs are dangerous to a sub-culture because it means that markers used to signal genuine interest in something can become drowned out by people imitating those markers in order to try and cash in on the cultural capital that interest has recently acquired, but who have no genuine interest. It gets harder to find people who actually care, and the search becomes emotionally taxing beyond the time investment because poseurs are naturally predisposed to treat an attempt at conversation on the subject they claim to have interest in as an attack and respond aggressively. They don't have any deeper knowledge, but they're pretending to, so an earnest attempt at conversation on the subject is met with contempt and hostility. People who use the community in good faith to discuss a subject they enjoy are inherently threatening to poseurs, who have an automatic incentive to lash out at them. As the number of poseurs makes up a larger portion of the community, they can start to support one another by establishing contempt for genuine interest in the subject they claim to love as a social norm of the community originally built around that subject, making it easier to get away with posing without much effort.

People who gatekeep to try and prevent poseurs from drowning the hobby are applying a really shitty solution to that problem, both in the sense that it doesn't work very well (if a hobby has enough social capital to draw in poseurs at all, it's probably going to draw in enough of them to outnumber the gatekeepers and foil any effort at gatekeeping anyway) and in that it's a shitty thing to do, like, as a person. They are at least reacting to a real problem caused by other shitty people, though.

A less justifiable, but not openly xenophobic reason for nerd gatekeeping is that as an interest goes mainstream, it experiences sudden, massive growth in its communities, which can have an Endless September effect. Rather than a steady trickle of new members who adapt to the community because they're outnumbered, the community gets a massive influx of new members whose superior numbers allows them to set cultural norms, often without even realizing they're doing so, and drown the original culture. Because this massive new audience usually has proportionately more money to spend, creators in the relevant hobby adapt their work to appeal to them. From the perspective of the original community, this results in a steady decline in quality of virtually all products or performances related to the hobby they loved so much they formed a community around it.

The position of the nerds who become gatekeepers at this point is still sympathetic. The people who most love the hobby and whose initial support allowed it to grow large enough to catch the attention of the mainstream are being abandoned in favor of catering to the mainstream who just barely showed up. It seems treacherous and disloyal. The thing is, "the mainstream" is not a single entity or even a coherent group of people. It's far past a single Dunbar's number of people, which means it's far past the point where its individual members can possibly coordinate actions between themselves without a formal bureaucracy, which means no one individual in the mainstream can reasonably be held responsible for it. At this point gatekeepers are either making the false accusation that this amorphous mass of people called "the mainstream" are somehow conspiring together to invade the hobby, or else they simply don't care that the people they're harming to defend their hobby have no individual responsibility for the negative side effects of going mainstream. They're assholes, and they're not even assholes as an indiscriminate response to problems caused by other assholes, but as a problem that arises as an unfortunate side effect of unintentional, emergent incentive structures that encourage individuals to collectively act in a way that is bad for the hobby and its community despite no one individual doing anything directly harmful to either.

And also some gatekeepers are just sexists who don't want any girls in their clubhouse, who are assholes because obviously they are. If nerd gatekeepers weren't predominantly made in this mold to begin with, they definitely are now, because the narratives that caught on when nerd gatekeeping first got going were things about "fake geek girls," which means gatekeepers who became gatekeepers for reasons unrelated to sexism gravitated towards sexist narratives to justify their actions. That's been going on for like eight years now, and now that nascent culture has well and truly metastasized.

Yeah, second that.

There's also the persistent idea that nerds are still being persecuted by the cool kids wearing jackets with letters on them. Now, maybe to an extent some of them are, but liking comic book characters or sci-fi isn't stigmatised when the highest grossing movies are about comic book characters or sci-fi. Even if those films tend to be dreadful.

Also, if you're bitter about the cool kids kicking you out of your club for being different, when you get to be cool don't kick people out of your club for being different.