Context people, Context.

I'm a major history buff. That means I know how to put things, such as facts, in their proper historical context and not get all bent out of shape about them. It doesn't make them right or wrong. It just helps you understand were to place them. So why do so many people find themselves incapable of placing historical writers in the context of the world they lived in?

Enter This guy. Another in a long list of bloggers who read a pulp story from the 1920's and apply a 2011 mindset to it.

Pro Tip. It doesn't work. You cannot separate the work from the time period it was created in or the audience it was created for! The thing you have to consider about Lovecraft, is was he exceptional for his time? Location? Class? Keep in mind that Lovecraft wrote Herbert West a scant 7 years after D.W. Griffith's A Birth of Nation came out. Look at Woodrow Wilson (yes, the President of the United States... was a horrible racist too!) and his writings of the time. He excused the KKK as a "Natural outgrowth of reconstruction". The 1910's, 20's and 30's were a time of profound racial oppression across the United States. Wilson, like Lovecraft had little compassion for immigrants of any race, even the Irish, who at the time weren't really white men either, they got upgraded later only because they were lighter skinned than the Italians!

There were books circulating at the time such as Madison Grant's "The Passing of the Great Race", Henry Ford's "The International Jew" and Houston Stewart Chamberlain's "Foundations of the 19th Century". These were books which inspired the atrocities which eventually came to Germany. Reading them today gives you a frightening glimpse into the popular zeitgeist that existed at the time. It makes you realize that Nazi Germany isn't that surprising, but what is surprising is that it only happened there and didn't spread to the rest of the western nations.

Before you begin chundering in impotent rage at some writer who lived nearly a hundred years ago, wrote for the people of his time, and was living in a time of extreme change the likes of which we wouldn't even be able to recognize. When Lovecraft was a boy, people still drove horse and buggy to town! Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to have a motor car, and that was when Lovecraft was 20 years old. You have to look at his entire life to understand where these feelings came from. He barely scraped by, his malnutrition may in fact have lead to his death. He viewed immigrants, much as many modern Americans today do, as some how taking the lively hoods of good, honest, hardworking Americans. The world which Lovecraft lived in, was in the early stages of transforming into the world we know today, but he himself grew up in, and of which he held the values from, is one which would be considered entirely alien today.

British literature is full of novels which show this transition. The transformation from the Victorian period, where people still fit into a rigid social order, to the modern day where to be a member of the upper class is to be ridiculed. In the last 50 years alone, such dramatic social change has influenced the western world that it is unrecognizable to what it once was. We have finally begun implementing the ideals which we built our nations on in the first place.

If you can't appreciate Lovecraft's work in the proper context, thats fine. To each their own. But don't act as if he was some how extraordinary in his views from that of the common man at the time.

Carl Macek's Robotech Universe.

I'm a Robotech Fan. I enjoy saying that. Part of my enjoyment of saying it is because it makes a lot of Anime fans exceedingly angry.

I like it for a variety of reasons. Nostalgia. The generational saga. The dense and convoluted storyline that arose from the combination of three pre-existing sagas along with new material.

Don't mistake me, I enjoyed all 3 of the original Japanese shows.. but I wasn't converted to the accepted dogma. I didn't abandon my Robotech fandom to rush into the arms of Macross. They mock, but it only makes me love it more.

Last year, the man responsible for "creating" Robotech from those three shows, Carl Macek, died. He was a talented man who gets berated greatly by the Anime fan community in general. They don't stop to think that he didn't originally want to put those three shows together, he wanted to show Macross on its own. But he was hampered by the syndication rules at the time. He took a bad situation, and found a solution to get that great material out to the people. Now you can just buy DVD's from Japan or even get them subtitled in the US, but at the time Anime was a nascent barely clinging together clump of cells.

Because of Carl, Robotech expanded beyond the confines of the TV series. It was adapted into a series of Novels, the novels expanded even further on the background of the show and were themselves integral to the creation of the Robotech RPG which went into stunning detail in filling in the gaps left by the construction method of the TV series. Many comic book series, two feature films, and an assortment of other bits and pieces followed.

Thats essentially not the story as presented in the new Documentary Carl Macek's Robotech Universe. Though it is present in its barest forms, most of the documentary is taken up, not buy the writers or technical people discussing how Carl made Robotech, but is instead mainly fixated on the voice actors lavishing praise on their recently dead friend. I understand that since Robotech was many of the VA's first job, they would wish to postulate on the man himself rather than his production. It just wasn't a very good documentary about Robotech, even though it was a decent enough one about Carl's Role in Robotech's creation. It re-iterated some of the mythology that Harmony Gold now makes use of. They've taken the tact of simply ignoring the critics entirely and creating a some what delusional world in which Robotech was the Saviour of Anime in North America. I love it to death but I think that Voltron, Macron 1, G-force, Star Blazers, and many many other shows were just as important to the burgeoning Anime fandom. I think that the role that Harmony Gold wants to place Robotech into, likely belongs in reality to Dragon Ball Z. DBZ was on multiple channels, multiple times a day, lasted forever, and it was sometime while the characters were still on Namek that the Anime bomb went off and it was EVERYWHERE.

When I was in Elementary school, Anime consisted of shows like Robotech and Voltron and Star Blazers, no one really watched it. When I got to Middle School, DBZ was on and a vast cross section of people with highly divergent interested were watching it. When I got to Highschool, Anime was literally everywhere. It was omnipresent. There were anime exclusive stores in the suburbs around Atlanta. Book stores were stocking Manga. Best buy had two whole aisles for Anime VHS tapes at outrageous prices.

I'm not trying to say that Robotech and Carl Macek played no part in this, it was back on TV at the time on Cartoon Network.. but I just feel its disengenueous to simply decide it was the most important catalyst.

Another problem I had with the documentary was Tommy Yune's casual dismissal of Transformers and Transformers fans. I'm not sure if Mr. Yune has noticed.. but while Tobey Mcquires live action Robotech film is floundering.. Michael Bay has produced a Trilogy of (admittedly bad films) which have cumulatively grossed billions of dollars. Robotech's 25th anniversary is largely remembered because of the hardcore fans of the series going back to the 80's, its high DVD sales are the result of perpetually releasing newer and newer DVD sets. Just since DVD got big around 2001, there have been no fewer than 5 different releases of the show on that format. Every one of them offers drips and drabs of new material. the first ones were just the broadcast masters, but were loaded with extras. Then they released just the broadcast show in bare bones release. Then they remastered the show using new tapes from Japan, cleaning it up and re touching the sounds. Those releases got re-released later with all of the special features from the original release. Now A&E has re-re-re-released a new set, that has all of the remastered shows, all of the special features from all of the sets along with this new documentary and a variety of other bits and pieces. They even finally acknowledge Robotech the movie, but don't go so far as to actually include it. Pity. I suppose they are holding it back, along with the new Yellow Dancer centric mini-film Robotech Love Live Alive (made from a Japanese music video and which will apparently bridge the gap between Southern Cross and New Generation) for another future release.

All of this isn't to dismiss the documentary. It was a good enough documentary, it simply wasn't what their hype made it out to be. It should have gone into more detail about the show itself, about the comics, about the controversy, about the very rational for creating it in the first place. Instead we just got a bunch of weepy voice actors talking about their friend.

The Final Countdown.

Well.. not really all that dramatic but it is getting close to the end of the year and I just got my grades for my Finals from school.

A+, A, A, and C+.

I'm really pleased with the C+ as it is Math, and being as Its been 8 years since I've used any of that stuff to say I was rusty would be an understatement. I went into the class fully expecting to bomb it, and while I didn't make a great grade.. I'm happy it wasn't any lower.


I'm hoping with my schedule for next year being more streamlined, I'll have more time to get back to work on the Hyborean Apocrypha project.

In other news, due either to Holiday hiring or an upswing in the local economy 5 members of my D&D group have managed to get jobs so that's some what putting a crimp on their availability. Will the group survive? will have to roll a Fortitude save to find out I suppose.

I'm going to be posting up my end of the year Tally for books I've read in 2011 in about 2 weeks time, I mentioned earlier in the week on Brian Murphey's blog The Silver Key that I wasn't sure I was going to meet my goal of 150 books, but due to hastily reading a few slim volumes (I.E. Cheating) I think I'm going to bag it this year. I'm going to set myself a smaller reading goal next year also to cope with the class work, since next year I'll be taking classes all year rather than just in the fall. But when you have a To be Read pile of nearly a thousand books, that despite how many you read never seems to go down, it doesn't take long to feel snowed under if I'm not constantly pushing myself.

I am planning on starting Stephen Erickson's massive Malazan series in January, and filling in a few more gaps in my classic Fantasy and Sword and Sorcery catalog with Andre Norton's Witch World and Phillip Jose Farmer's World of Tiers. I'm going to try and finish up the last 6 of the Shannara novels I've got to read too. We will see.

My Theory on B.O.T (a.k.a. the single worst episode of transformers ever)

The episode is notoriously bad. It is so bad it dethrones season 3's Carnage in C-Minor for the title of worst episode ever. It's really, really, mind numbingly bad. All is not lost however.

Over the last several years, inspired by such diverse products as Apocalypse Now! Redux! and Star Trek: Remastered, I have been working on a new episode list for the 1980's Transformers cartoon that will not only make the series some what more serialized and coherent but also hopefully eliminate some of the obnoxious flaws.. hopefully without having to physically alter any of the episodes. Impossible? Maybe.

For the most part it is simply using the already present chronology of season 1 and then building on it so as to create a logical introduction to new characters. As the episodes stand now, new people show up in Season 2 with no real reason for them being there, only to promptly vanish for the next episode which inexplicably only features characters from season 1. In other words, its hardly rocket science.

But then you come to the obvious point of this, what do with the worst episode ever? Well it falls production wise as the last episode of Season 2. Meaning it is the last episode before Transformers: The Movie. This is, to me, unacceptable, and since it's a free country I'm going to do something about it. I started to look around for ideas of what could be done with it. It's so bad, and contains so many animation errors that the idea of re-editing it some how using bits of other episodes (beyond the obvious that this would be breaking my own rules) was a bit too technical for me to undertake.

I hit on a solution one evening while researching the Chronology of Super Dimensional Fortress: Macross. SDF: Macross was a huge hit in Japan. They made a movie, SDF: Macross Do you remember love?, it was a huge hit also. But it fundamentally changed extremely important aspects of the TV Show, and more or less made the relatively human looking Zentradi into very much more monstrous beings. The reason for that is, Chronologically speaking, SDF: Macross DYRL?, is itself a movie within the SDF: Macross Universe. Released in theatres some time around the Macross Plus era, while there are Descendants of Zentradi living on earth! It was followed by a sequel, Macross II the Movie. Genius. How to include something that completely screws up the canon, while not completely screwing up the canon.

It dawned on me then, B.O.T. could be a Transformers Movie, inside the Transformers universe. It explains why most of the characters are from season 1 (the ones who would have been seen on the real news more frequently) it also explains why the kids act so preposterously precocious.. and all the flaws in the episode can then be chalked up to "Well, Hollywood got it wrong, as usual". There is even evidence from the episode "Hoist Goes Hollywood" that there are directors in that universe who want to cast transformers as actors, why not characters?

However, I figure the Sunbow Universe's equivalent of Michael Bay still directed it, which would also go a long way to explain why the episode is so bad.

Geography, Learn it, Use it, Understand it.

Having just got done reading Dodai Stewart's otherwise well thought out article on Jezabel about why modern reinterpretations of fairy tales have such an aversion to casting non white cast members.. This quote really annoyed me, I mean beyond the obvious notion of why would a dark skinned lady be called "Snow White"...

"Last year around this time, an actress went to a casting call and was told she was too brown to be a Hobbit. It's infuriating to think that a world that includes orcs, elves and dragons cannot include brown-skinned people."

First of all, just to get this out there. Middle-earth has "Brown-skinned people". However, here is the rub. Racial groups do not just randomly spring up in various proportions on the globe without human agency being involved. Even if you have only seen the Peter Jackson films, you know Middle Earth has a variety of skin tones amongst its human population. The problem is that they are geographically isolated from 'The west' by Mordor and a couple of big darn deserts. You don't just get Hobbits with a bunch of different 'races'.. because Hobbits are a 'Race' unto themselves. Its highly unlikely there are a bunch of white people roaming around in Rhun or Far Harad either, and if they are they are almost certainly evil men who sided with Mordor and have simply been living their ever since the fall of Numenor.

If you look at Howard's Hyboria, there is far greater transit between the various ethnic groups present. You might find a Kushite in Shem, and you might find a Cimmerian in Shem, But you wouldn't find a Black Cimmerian anymore than you would find a White Kushite. Unless there is some human agency at work to shift people from one place to another, or an enterprising person decides to up and move themselves, manages to fit in and become part of a pre-existing community.. I suppose it could happen.. its just not very likely.

When this is done, like it was in Willow, Though this isn't to say that some where there isn't an entire group of black Nelwyns or a close relative of them. Or the BBC's recent Robin Hood series, it tends to look extremely forced and done simply to avoid the PC police's notice. They make fun of it on South Park by actually naming the one black kid at the school 'Token'. Let us be honest with ourselves here. If it weren't for the transatlantic slave trade it's very likely the very idea of having a massive multi-cultural milieu would be considered the norm. Japan, China, and the various eastern countries where there was no African slave trade are for the most part homogenous, or at least homogenous to western eyes. And were it not for human agency (empire, immigration, commonwealth) England,would just as Homogenous as Japan is. So why would you expect their to be a variety of colours of hobbits when their is no evidence of their ever being hobbits in a climate where having dark skin would make evolutionary sense?

Is it seriously coming down to this, that despite all we know of evolution and anthropology we are simply supposed to believe that dark skinned people would just naturally appear in Norway? Why would evolution do that? What possible reason would it have?

Yes, its annoying and frustrating and I'm sure infuriating that Hollywood doesn't produce more fantasy fair with non white casts. Even when they adapt a property such as Earthsea or the last Airbender they tend to white-wash the cast, this is unacceptable and I think morally repugnant. I'd just about kill to see Imaro on the big screen. But the answer for this injustice is not forcing middle earth to have a random "brown" hobbit. Fantasy as a genre is more than capable of having heroes, heroines, villains, villagers, or city dwellers of any culture or colour imaginable. But if the Geography as laid out in the story precludes it, then accept it and move on.

Sounds to take you back.

There are two ways for Movies to go. They either have a Score or a Soundtrack, or sometimes both. Usually the scores are forgettable and the soundtracks filled with either 40 year old Thin Lizzy and AC/DC songs or new songs from bands no one will remember in 10 years let alone 40.

Occasionally however a movie will make tremendous use of a song. Every time you hear it from then on you will remember it. My own example of this is the way that Nine Inch Nail's The Mark has been made, was used in Man on Fire. Every time the percussion starts in the song I can picture Denzel Washington going and picking out all the supplies he needs to wage a one man war on the Mexican cartel that has kidnapped the little girl he was supposed to protect.

It is an ominous and haunting song on its own. But when you add in the pathos of the scene where a still bleeding John Creasy is preparing to get revenge, it becomes almost depraved through its anguish. The music accentuates it to a near feverish pitch.

Of course, this is just my opinion, so your mileage will vary.

Monkeying around.

Phillipa Boyens (one of the writers of the Peter Jackson Tolkien Adaptions) made the comment that a Tolkien Purist is some one who is a self proclaimed guardian of the material.. I would argue that a Purist is a person who simply doesn't like her monkeying with the material... for her own shallow social engineering/politically correct reasons.

Don't get me wrong, I realize that certain changes must be made to adapt any novel to film or television. For the most part the changes to the Rings films were mild. This isn't some rant about Tom Bombadil being left out. The films also could have been much worse, after all the Hollywood financiers wanted them to kill one of the Hobbits! Make no mistake, bullets were dodged. But it was clearly the screenwriters choice to so drastically alter the entirety of Faramir's character. It was their choice to alter Theoden's character. It's there choice to add characters when they don't really need to be added. All of these things can and should be laid at their feet.