æʃliŋ, purrepurrocessor @aescling@cat.family

It's expressly stated near the end that "Luthorism" actually uses some of Superman's economic ideas. Of course, that makes it something of a "third way" between capitalism and communism. Historically that implies some form of fascism, which is a different problem entirely with the story's politics.

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Do any of the political ideas in the comic even make sense? Superman is a communist because he keeps track of all of the economy, but Luthor’s economic plan once he became president gives the government control over every dollar… when the government has control over all of the economy, that’s called communism. So how is the story a capitalism Vs. communist thing?

“socialism is when the government does stuff. the more stuff it does, the more socialist it is. and if it does a whole lot of stuff, that’s communism.”

It’s a great splash page, but I’m not really crazy about the costume: there’s too much blue. I get it, they wanted it to look a lot like the original. I would think it would be Soviet Army green, but then again, according the dialogue, he wasn’t a soldier. Yellow would have been too gaudy, and black would have made him look evil. But he’s Stalinist Superman, so he should at least look evil.

lmao

side point but i just keep thinking about how embarrassing it is that the comics industry hails Red Son (the comic) so much. besides how great (some of) the drawing are but like. capitalist hegemony is really something.

That glass globe scene was just amazing. The way it showed the light to Superman and opening him to another point of view literally made me shiver. To be able to change one's mind who was so used to a way of thinking (and you know how hard that is) in a way that didn't need punching and bone breaking- just words was lit- genius. I loved it, and I hope I get to emulate the quiet, serene scene in any future story I'll be able to ever tell.

ok. sure.

wild how people think the movie’s adaptation of Wonder Woman (which SURE IS SOMETHING) is “feminist propaganda” when the comic being adapted from is like, ALMOST kinda literally just radfem (i say almost because while VERY cynical about men in power, it moderates that cynicism by the end) but

like literally in the comic Lois Lane recruits Wonder Woman to fight Superman by leveraging their shared frustration with the powerful men in their lives

i really want to find somebody who will actually talk concretely about what the end of the comic is actually saying, because it sure does something, introducing an extremely ironic twist (for what reason? i don’t yet understand what the twist Says?), but people would just rather praise it for being Nuanced or some nonspecific shit

(the movie’s ending is less interesting and somewhat less silly (though still, very silly, and far too optimistic about the role of the US in the world lol, but))

But the fight scenes were cool,

they are decidedly different; the comic’s approach to fights was to end them immediately (with some interesting exceptions) to emphasize how much more powerful Superman is than everybody else (with a particular exception highlighting how someone’s actually gotten the upper hand on him for once). thonestly i wonder how much of that is a byproduct of the fact that the story had to be heavily condensed to fit the space DC gave to the comic the voice acting was decent, and the anim; even if so i thought it worked well for the story

by making the action Cooler and generally longer i think the movie really lost this. i would say they didn’t get what the fights were saying, but then again they just outright didn’t care about preserving what the comic had to say and just did their own thing. which, theoretically, is good, because the comic had very little of value to actually say. the movie does not make good use of this opportunity

[…] and the animation, while not great, kept the same basic spirit of the comic art.

DISAGREE. much of the best ideas in the comic are its visuals (which are unfortunately still tied to the utterly inane and incurious things the comic has to say but) and the movie throws out so much imagery that is either storytelling in some way, or at the very least, damn cool

come to nobody's surprise that condensing a 3-part comic storyline that spans decades into an 80+ minute movie means that a lot of material will be cut and changed to meet the demands of the runtime AND make the story less serialized

this is an interesting comment because the comic in the first place struggled very hard with the number of things it wanted to do in the amount of space it had, so it dealt with a lot through Superman narrating the comic in retrospect and dealing with many of its conflicts in very abstract ways. if i were to adapt the comic, i would think about how i’d have an opportunity to fill things in and make it more concrete, or at least less rushed, which i do think the movie actually managed to some recurrent. though the skill in execution throughout was decidedly lost

landing the spike hitbox on marcina dair feels great every time

*on the chapter that criticizes such “anything but class” academics

i was also disappointed that the book’s subtitle—Rational Fascism And The Overthrow Of Communism—did not mean so much “how fascism has played a role in the global overthrow of communism” as “we will talk about fascism at the beginning to hook you in, and then talk about various other topics relative to communism and its fall”

look i haven't played pokemon for well, well over a decade

wait are those even the same evolution line

oh i never updated my profile metadata for this bit

when the video essay is half an hour long, filmed in a studio, and yet, the audio is clipping from the start

anyway the book ends on the chair going after such academics so it feels Pretty Bad