Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
On Sunday last week, Damascus fell to Salafi terrorists and other imperialist-aligned forces. Regardless of the flaws of the ousted government, this is a horrible situation for the Syrian proletariat as well as for the people of Palestine, Lebanon and others. We can only hope for the perseverance of the Syrian workers and the remaining anti-colonial resistance.
☭ Matrix homeserver and space
☭ Theory reading group on hiatus, will move to Lemmygrad next year
☭ Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna's Archive, libgen
Arcane season 2 is so shit. I'm on S2E4 and unlikely to watch another minute. The only clear message so far is
spoiler
cops are good, actually.Everything else is a sequence of ten-second adverts for what might happen next—what's that another clip after another after another? When is the story supposed to start? Did somebody forget to write actual scenes and a storyline? Who tf decided that the way to make interminably long fight scenes interesting was to break them up and show you several at once?
Now I've seen a spoiler for the ending and not only do I not care, it's confirmed that I'm making the right decision by ducking out so soon. It's like a board room had all the elements of S1 on a wall, asked what was good, and deleted all those elements. Can't have the poor rooting for the good and relatable characters. They must reject what they know and cheer for the cops or else.
If S2 was a standalone thing, it would just be a forgettable look-at-that-nice-artwork-but-I'm bored-now and I'd have soon turned it off without a second thought. But what a disappointment after the first season!
If anyone can enlighten me as to how they went from S1-writing to S2-writing, I'd love to hear it. 1/10 would not recommend.
EDIT: I saw @bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml already answered my question elsewhere: https://redsails.org/the-swerve/
I tried to start watching S2 cause of watching S1, for the heck of it, but couldn't get far. S1 felt very contrived as storytelling goes. Great animations and illustrations, but everything else, I could never relate to the hype.
In particular, the whole thing with
spoiler
powder falling into the hands of the baddie bad was so contrived it was painful to watch.Edit: Also, that essay is a good read, thanks for sharing it.