The Reaping: Blood Libel Is OK If You Have A Black Sidekick

So I was watching The Reaping just now, and it was shaping up to be a mildly entertaining flick. And then came the part, about halfway through the film, where poor Hilary Swank finally tells the whole story of how her husband and daughter died: The Sudanese ritually sacrificed them both as an offering to the rain gods.

WHAT.

The flashbacks rolled on as an eeeevil spooky ignorant painted witch doctor gutted the precious Aryan missionary family, destroying Swank's pure Christian faith with his dark and barbaric savagery (not to mention his machete).

Oh, the pathos!

The moral of the story: no matter how much you try to teach them your modern ways, dirty primitive third-world people such as Christian/animist refugees, Jews and hobos will straight up kill your innocent blonde children at the first sign of a dry summer. They just don't know any better. And of course, the spectre of the spooky witch-doctor follows Whitey McHonkenweiss around with a machete throughout the film lest we, the audience, forget her suffering. Bleah! I keep wanting to yell "You missed one! She's right here!"

There is only one thing that could redeem this heap of blood-libelous bullshit now: ROCKS FALL, EVERYONE DIES. That's it. No other options remain.

And yeah, I know it's just a movie and I shouldn't take it so seriously, but this is the 21st century. Do we white people really still need to be doing this racist bullshit? It's like a StormFront campfire story where everyone sits around and deliberately avoids toasting marshmallows to preserve their pure whiteness. I can hear them now:

SCOUTMASTER:
And then the big scary negro.... interbred with the white women!

CAMPERS:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!


EDIT: Aaaaand the only black character is an ex-gangbanger. Of course he is. And he dies first. Of course he does.

Kingdom Hospital

God dammit, Stephen King. Stop putting Bryan Smith running you over with his van in everything you write. He's been dead for years and it's getting creepy.

Don't make us stage an intervention, now.

SNARKING HEROES (Spoiler Post)

Somebody needs to smack the writers of Heroes on the nose a couple of times with a rolled-up copy of the X-Men. For serious, they're phoning it in this season like never before. Say guys, let's give Sylar AND Peter the Tragic Vampire Curse of Can't Stop Killing, aka the hunger.

The HUNNNNGER!!!!!!

So now the hero and the villain are going to switch places and we can wank away about the nature of good and evil as it pertains to fairly bland rich kids on a rampage? Oh god, they'd better not. Maybe the guy who plays Sylar can pull off a redemption plot, but making Peter Petrelli an angsty psychic vampire is like sticking fangs on a block of firm tofu. Oh, the menace.

I'll be honest. I lost interest in the Sylar/Peter dichotomy thing way back in Season 1. Part of that is that Peter is just uninteresting as fuck to me. All he does is the same stuff everyone else does, only whinier. There are ways to do a "Hoshit, Vanyel Has Every Single Talent There Is" plot well, but this isn't one of them.

Sylar scraped by because at least he had the decency to kill the original owner of each ability, so it would be unique to him from that point on. Once he got to the character, that power was off the board for anyone else--until Peter comes along and makes an emergency backup and pushes the power inflation up another notch.

I appreciate that they were trying to build them into a dark side/light side nemesis affair, but there's nothing fresh in that dynamic that I want to explore. Also, Peter's God Moding spawns way too many cheapass plot twists (time travel! Telepathy! ANGST!) and keeps Peter and his various sexy-scarred future-clones at the forefront of the story where I can't reasonably ignore them. I'm vastly more interested in the other characters who struggle to master just their own individual talents.

Here's why it annoys me. Currently, three characters besides Claire now have the healing factor (going on two, but I haven't seen the end of this episode yet). But Hayden needs screen time, so now she's special! She can't die. (Except for in the first season where saving her life was kind of the entire point.)

Don't even get me started on the Gives Powers formula, the Takes Powers Away formula, the Bad CGI virus, the magical reappearing/disappearing apocalypse, or the way guys keep flying around with blonde women in their arms. Someone still isn't over their high school sweetheart dumping them for the quarterback and it shows.

And triplets! Triplets for everyone. Sure can't get enough of those constantly respawning Ali Larters. I'm calling it right now: by season 4 they're going to be quints.

All in all, Heroes has been a decently fun waste of time, but the flaws are starting to really clunk.

Oh, who am I kidding? We all know that if I had free reign to fix this show, I would probably rename it HIRO AND ANDO DO AMERICA and the whole thing would take place during Mardi Gras so all the girls could be topless except for shiny plastic beads. I have no room to throw stones.

EDIT: Finished the episode. All I have to say is, three fucking characters now have the ability to permanently copy everybody else's talents? What the fuck is this shit? I feel so stupid for liking this show right now.

Best Chair and Kefka's Prayer

The gods have heard my cry for more furniture to populate my crack-den looking bedroom! While I was biking with the Captain tonight, I found a tiny gray-blue rocker/recliner by the roadside with a FREE sign on it.

It looked okay, but I've done this dance before. First thing to do with free shit is always, always perform a sniff test. It smelled like somebody's nice clean apartment, so I checked all over for nasty shit--bugs, burn marks, vomit inside the cushions. Nothing wrong there either. So I sat in it and reclined to check for broken parts or random collapsing furniture disorder.

Nothing seemed amiss, although there was one small tear on the footrest and a small red stain on the backrest (not blood). It fit perfectly into the station wagon, too. After Seebs and Rah carried it up the stairs for my crippled worthless ass, I spent the next two hours lying in it, playing video games and occasionally demanding my roomies each come and admire the Best Chair Ever.

FACT! Best Chair is super squishy and just the right size for a short wad of Lukas to snuggle up on.

FACT! The little stain took three seconds to scrub out using 409 and a rag, and the rip is on the bottom and won't even show if I take the trouble to mend it.

FACT! It provides support for my neck while I watch DVDs on the computer. This will help the healing process.

FACT! Nobody cares about Best Chair but me.


In less perseverative news, I had another psych appointment today. Dr. D wanted to see my art, so I showed her on her laptop. Kind of awkward since she's such a nice lady and my sense of humor is awfully rough around the edges, but hey--this is someone I'm paying to get to know me better. Sooner or later she'll find out I draw My Little Ponies on fire and girls with masses of eyeballs instead of cooters, so it might as well be sooner.

I also did a little depression quiz thing, and am assigned the task of picking a local doctor so I can get a prescription for ritalin.

Also I screwed up and forgot to ask lawyer guy to send the Northfield clinic their own separate proof that I've retained him, so they're threatening to send my bill to collections.

Hmm. You know, next time somebody brushes off ADHD as no big deal, I should show them a printout of my credit rating. I don't want to become diagnosis-becomes-my-catchall-scapegoat guy, but if the shoe fits...

FACT! I was sleeping this morning and the dog started scratching himself in his sleep. He was kicking the wall Rah and I share so loudly it woke me up. I made him get off the bed, and he fear-peed all over my nice soft blanket AND it got on my sheet. I suppose I should be happy that this has only happened a couple of times in the past year of dog ownership, but I can't pretend visions of luau roasts weren't dancing in my groggy head.

Completely unrelated, but I composed this earlier and need to write it down so I don't forget:

THE INSANITY PRAYER
Lord, grant me the ambition to conquer the world,
The power to enslave mankind with my Ray of Judgment,
And the badass final boss mutations to kill any spunky heroes who invade my dungeon and try to make a difference.

Amen.

More Advice For Bad Writers

I hate how every cool, competent female character I used to admire on TV turned out to be a helpless little wisp of a thing hiding her vulnerability behind a tough-as-nails disguise to escape from the pain of her tragic past.

Writers, if the idea of genuine independence is too threatening for you, go find a different character type to play with! Demolishing a heroine's personality just so a big strong male lead can come along and replace it is such pathetic wish fulfillment.

On Bad Writing

OMG spoilers ahead for Lost and the Dark Tower!

The producers of Lost recently went on record to explain how they listen to fan complaints and have altered the show according to viewer wishes, and this is why much of the last season has sucked.

Well, duh. At least they finally admit to it. But do the producers place the blame on themselves for being so bad at planning and telling a story that they actually have wiggle room to allow the audience control over their brainchild?

No, they blame the fans... for having bad ideas!

This weak shit really reminds me of that time when Stephen King stopped the final Dark Tower novel cold in the middle of the climax to bitch out the readers at extreme length because he imagined we might want to find out what happens next in the story.

We were the worst sort of people, he chastised, unimaginative human potatoes who would gleefully deny Frodo his nice peaceful retirement and probably caused the Holocaust too. Wah.

After a buildup of three decades and seven books, you're goddamn skippy we want to find out how it ends. If you didn't want anyone to know what Roland discovers waiting at the top of the Tower, you could have, oh... never published the book.

Me? I'm reading to the end of what you wrote, and screw the fourth-wall-breaking lack of writer's craft that led you to shame me for it.

There's a difference between asking a writer to add pointless sequels to a finished story a la FF7: Advent Bad Movie, and wanting to know how the book ends in the first place. Similarly, there's a difference between criticizing a story element and demanding to be given control over it.

In neither case is "Fine, I'll give you greedy little shits what you want, and I hope you choke on it!" an appropriate answer.

And so, Dear Lost producers/writers/dogfood, I know how heavily you rely on fan input, so I hope this is useful for you:

Your audience complained that the supporting cast is populated with unimportant, pointless warm bodies. To address this, you abruptly thrust two boring extras into the spotlight out of nowhere. You did this without any lead-in, and without showing us why we should even care about these two people in the first place.

It was obvious from the start you were merely fulfilling an obligation. Yet you promoted this development as a major leap forward in the story. Extras will now be people! Woo! Only, not really. Everyone else on the island was still nothing more than a blurry background motion--exactly what people were annoyed about in the first place.

Several episodes later, you decided that the fans weren't warming to these suddenly overexposed characters quickly enough for you. The audience wasn't buying it, and so you decided to spin this into proof that you had been right all along. See, you still weren't getting it.

And so you wasted a full episode saying "I Told You So!" by killing off these two pointless new main characters in a manner I can only describe as 'nakedly retaliatory.' And now, the failure of Nikki and Paolo has given you a perfect excuse to never try anything new or take risks with side characters ever again.

Sweet deal, we could always use more scenes of Kate weeping with indecision over the unwashed penis buffet God has seen fit (in His inscrutable way) to serve her.

And now you're in an interview, gleefully rubbing the fans' faces in the whole debacle as proof that they had no idea how to tell a story.

Guess it takes one to know one.