• they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)


ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

but on a more practical level, i don't understand why it works

like is it just that people really do want to indulge their absolute worst impulses in tv form?

what exactly is supposed to be enjoyable about watching show after show where everyone is a cruel and selfish monster to everyone around them?

even my cold, cynical heart can't bring myself to watch the rich and powerful try to convince us that everyone is like them and that decency and kindness are weaknesses to be punished

also how the fuck is the Bear a "comedy"? has the bar really lowered this far?


pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing

some years ago I worked a night shift job at a small biodiesel factory near Seattle. it was a nasty slippery dangerous job but still the best one I'd had in a while so I tried to do my best. it was tough, though, when my coworkers would insist on filling the control room with awful nasty prestige TV shows. I desperately wanted to watch Sailor Moon or something FUN and colorful to keep up my spirits but nope, they wanted to watch prestige TV garbage.

this was the worst: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_(TV_series)

Hugh Laurie playing yet another unethical shitbag doctor, a "forensic neuropsychiatrist", except this show gets right into how he's doing crimes and vigilante work and there's not much doctoring as I recall. The worldview of the show is that there's secret supervillains lurking everywhere and the only way to get 'em is doing crimes I guess.

Why would you want to watch this at three in the morning in a dimly lit factory full of shadows and strange noises, I don't know. I tried to counter with my own music but bleh

~Chara


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in reply to @ann-arcana's post:

i only saw bits and pieces (but rather large bits and pieces) while staying at a friend's house and i still have to wonder where the comedy is. there's nothing funny about it! also the show just felt miserable all the time

The closest thing to a joke structure in the entire first episode is just the ragingly homophobic brother who also calls some gamers "incels" later. It's not funny, but I can see where the piece of shit who wrote it might've thought they were making some clever point.

The interesting aspect to me is that this kind of "prestige" has never, historically, lasted. My favorite example is that the Raffles books, written by Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law about a mean-spirited "gentleman thief," massively outsold that weird detective guy. Fast forward only a couple of decades, and which one stuck to the culture and had hundreds of imitators?

It also reminds me a lot of when the Fox network launched. They took on "edgy" material, and everybody raved about its importance, but...how much of it actually clung to culture? The Simpsons is still around, but people stopped caring about almost everything else they aired within a couple of years.

The fascism comparison isn't bad, because it's a similar "short term gains, even though nobody wants this crap to stick around" situation...

The whole world view of “people are evil and kindness is weakness” is so so pervasive between “prestige” and “reality” TV that it really starts to feel like deliberate propaganda. I can’t help think maybe part of why the field was so ripe for fascism, is we’ve been inundated with such a vicious worldview for decades.

That's entirely fair, too. I mean, right-wing policies don't make any sense, unless we believe that everybody is extremely stupid, extremely prone to hurt people, and incapable of growth or change. And even when modern television tries to change course, it's almost always "how can a white man navigate such a horrible world and still be (ick) nice?"