FMK Hiatus

[melannen]

Sorry, all! I think I am going to declare a hiatus on FMK polls at least until the YT deadline - I am super behind on writing reviews and reading as it is, and I really need to not get distracted from [redacted] until then. We are exactly 2/3 of the way through! And I promise I will bring it back once my YT fic is posted!

Meanwhile I will try to catch up on FMK reviews and maybe even post some non-FMK stuff????

First up: Thor: Ragnarok: super fun, there has not been nearly enough Valkyrie/Bruce/Hulk fic being posted yet. And I keep kind of going *headtilt* at ? Maybe I have just listened to too much Metis in Space (false, impossible to listen to too much Metis In Space) but I'm not seeing it. To start with, it would have to have some speaking characters who weren't from actively colonialist cultures? It has some of actors and production people who weren't, which is great! But not so much characters? The only one I can think of is Surtur, who... basically gets treated as a mindless evil monster. yay. And the ending is "A shipful of unimaginably privileged children of Empire head to Earth, the last remaining world of the empire that's not in active rebellion, secure in the knowledge that their inherent cultural, genetic, and technological superiority will let them have their pick of the lands." Not so anti-colonialist really? I mean, I left the movie with a fic half-plotted where they end up in an ACTUAL Earth refugee camp, living like Earth refugees - Banner knows a guy who knows a guy, so at least they won't starve - but I really don't think that's what the movie was heading for (it certainly isn't where the comics storyline did, although I suppose they did get stuck with Oklahoma.) Maybe I have been too far into the Sagas but "we fucked up politically at home so now we shall sail out and take over your lands" is a really familiar ending to an Old Norse history (Hi there, Immigrant Song!)

What it was, was TRYING TO NOT BE ACTIVELY PRO-COLONIALIST. And that, don't get me wrong, was an amazing enough step on its own! And we are all so used to the background roar of colonialism in all our stories, especially space opera movies, that having one that says outright, "hey, bro, maybe we should try to be not that, this time" feels like it's gone all the way the other way. Especially compared to certain other Marvel films! If all movies were as not-pro-colonialism as that one, we would be most of the way there already. But I think we may have to wait for Black Panther to get one that actually goes all the way to anti.

Also I can't make the demographics of Asgard make ANY SENSE. Is the entire on-planet population of Asgard supposed to be on that ship with Thor? Because there were AT MOST 2000 people crossing the Bridge. Which is pretty much in line with the population size we see in the comics, but that says really specific things about how Asgard's culture and its empire work; "King over less people than went to my high school and some vassals in other lands" frankly sets him well below Tony Stark in real power even before Ragnarok. Or were there still people in the city at the end and Thor and Loki just killed them all? That actually makes more sense in terms of the movie's timeline - because there were still a lot of people there when Hela discovered the location of the hideaway, and the time-gap between that and when everyone was on the bridge was at most an hour or so, which was not enough to finish a larger evacuation. But the emotional note of the ending was really, really not "we just killed a bunch of our own people."

Fanfic seems to be split on whether they saved most of the civilians or killed most of them. What do y'all think?

I mean, the real answer is probably "they didn't want computer-generated crowd scenes and you can only handle so many extras". And I did think the way they seem to have used computer animation only for the stuff that really needed it was pretty cool - the fact that I looked at the crowd scenes and though "oh, they ran out of extras" somehow made the amazing floating space city they were in *more* real, because my mind was reading it as an on-location shoot. Which was pretty cool.

Comments

[oracne]

I was wondering about the population size, too, but decided that bit was made of Hand Wavium.

[melannen]

Yeah, I mean, the real answer is that This Is Not A Movie To Apply Logic To. But still!

[stellar_dust]

I ... what? Nothing in Thor struck me as an explicit commentary on colonialism, either way.

[melannen]

SOO MANY REVIEWS ABOUT HOW ANTICOLONIALIST IT WAS.

I mean, there was the "dramatic reveal" about how Asgard was built on a foundation of conquest and oppression? which, yes?

And there were some people talking about Valkyrie's character arc re: tropes about Indigenous women, and it is super-awesome that a part-Maori woman got the role and there Maori-ish elements in her character design. But if you gave that storyline to a white dude actor it's, like, basically the plot of a thousand war movies? It's really cool that a WOC got that kind of role, but there's nothing deeply anticolonialist about her character.

[schneefink]

I sort of assumed that most of the civilians had been killed by Hela, not because it makes sense but because I don't like thinking about what the alternative meant for the ending of the movie. At the very least Thor and Loki think that everyone else has been killed by Hela, and nobody wants to be the one to tell them otherwise.

[melannen]

That makes as much sense as anything, I guess? Although the civilians she rounded up in that last scene in the city didn't really seem like a) the last holdouts or b) people who had already seen 90% of their friends and family slaughtered - I mean, at that point "I will kill people if you don't talk" no longer works as a threat. And she really didn't have time to kill anyone after that, unless she has, like, major area-effect death spells, in which case why bother with the fight on the bridge?

"Heimdall is lying to Thor and Loki" might explain it but I can't really see Heimdall doing that to that extent.

I can come up with half a dozen explanations but they all wind up working against the movie one way or another.

[eleanorjane]

I had the same reaction to the size of Asgard's population. It just makes no sense, and is a gaping plot hole, ugh.

I've gone through the previous two movies now, to look, and Asgard itself is freaking *huge* - the city, I mean, to say nothing of the rest of the land. We never see really big crowd scenes, but there are enough people to make the city feel lived-in, albeit spacious. So I have a hard time imagining Asgard as having less than a couple of million people, at least.

[melannen]

Yeah, I could almost buy from what we saw in Ragnarok that there were less than 100,000 people living there, especially if they're all living in imperial luxury, but Thor 2 was definitely going for something much more cosmopolitan than that.

[eleanorjane]

Yup :)

I giffed up a bunch of city shots from Thor 1 and 2 -- I'll link rather than include them inline as they're all quite large:

http://www.monologous.com/gifs/asgard-11.gif

http://www.monologous.com/gifs/asgard-12.gif

http://www.monologous.com/gifs/asgard-13.gif

http://www.monologous.com/gifs/asgard-21.gif

http://www.monologous.com/gifs/asgard-22.gif

http://www.monologous.com/gifs/asgard-23.gif

Obviously some inconsistencies between Thor 1 and Thor 2, but they agree on scale if nothing else.

[rachelmanija]

I am loving FMK and will await its reviews and return.

Meantime, I think I'll return to it as a substitute for reading the news.

[melannen]

That is a good plan!

Then I can read yours instead of the news, too.