My face when I go to a metal gig and the music is as fast as grandma on her walker.

I like fast music, music to jump to, to get wild, I blame my whole musical taste on Paranoid by Black Sabbath, the first time I heard the song playing Rock n' Roll Racing as a kid I went nuts, but when I was a kid I also really liked the song Chopis Centis by Mamonas Assassinas (I mentioned them briefly in this rant) and only years later I discovered it was a parody of Should I Stay or Should I Go by The Clash, so I guess speed has chosen me.

This pointless rant is not just to complain about how slow the songs of the mainstream of alternative extreme rock have become (in the last 20 years already), but also about a bit of culture shock within my geographical scope, because the way I see it, there's a mainstream and an underground alternative extreme rock scene, and for some reason there seems to be an ethical difference along with the musical differences...

I remember when screamo was very popular in the mid '00s, my thought back then was that it was the emo kids wanting to look tough because they were tired of being bullied, and it was in general the kids that would hang out in shopping centers and worship clothing stores and stuff, there wasn't a very political or social ethos, a lot of style and little substance... in my city it even manifested as a recruiting ground for evangelical churches, out of nowhere there were three or four Christian screamo bands that would go to underground gigs to leaflet church stuff, at the time there was this church called Bola de Neve (Snowball) backing them, so I started my punk distro called Bola de Fogo (Fireball) to poke fun at them... I didn't like the people involved in general, but looking back, some were idiots, but I also was an asshole to one of them and that guy really didn't deserve it, and if I remembered his name I would say I was wrong and I'm sorry for that.

Anyway, these shopping center variants of metal and punk, like screamo, metalcore, deathcore, I never really saw them playing in the underground in my geographical scope (I talk a lot about it in this journal entry - it has a bunch of cool pictures of underground gigs in the countryside of a third world country), I knew they were more of the mainstream of the alternative independent scene, but for me it was still alternative (at least the ones that weren't evangelical).

Flash forward to when I moved to my current city, didn't know anyone, there was some biker event going on and I showed up there and talked to random kids that looked alternative, they told me there was going to be a "hardcore" gig a few days later, I showed up at the gig, very unfamiliar, brand T-shirts instead of band T-shirts, one band on the flyer said it played "djent" and I had never heard of it before, I think what they called hardcore was some post-screamo or something, and the headliner I didn't even know was kinda famous in the metal scene, back then they had already opened shows for Stone Sour, Gojira, and Slipknot... while I never had any problem going alone to punk and metal gigs where I didn't know anyone, I was really feeling like a fish out of water there, it was only then that I noticed that despite both being alternative, how different the mainstream was from the underground, and one thing that stuck with me from that night was when the bass string of one of the bands broke and the band members were all looking at each other not knowing what to do, and none of the other bands lifted a finger, they just looked away, out of nowhere one guy came from the crowd and just put his bass on the stage and left, he was from the thrash metal band that was going to play later that night, they were the only familiar sight there, with band T-shirts and patches and buttons instead of looking like the regular shopping center dweller, and it was only them that had the spirit of solidarity that formed the underground scene, while the rich shopping center kids just ignored each other - they were also the only band I musically liked that night.

I met some other guys there, they were straight edge, had a hardcore band, they'd also do gigs, great, I hung out with them once and their night out was going out for a coffee lol, super weird, but they were ok people, once they showed up at my home and we played a lot of vinyls and ordered a pizza too, and some weeks later it was their hardcore gig... it was screamo, metalcore, post-hardcore again, super slow music, really not my thing, it was a very independent gig but again not with a political or social background, and what marked me from that night was the "mosh pit", nobody would touch anyone, they were all meters apart, each kicking and punching the air in their own circle... did you see that link I put from the journal entry? This video below is in there:

Two gigs later the next event they made was some church stuff and I never met them again... so I can't help but wonder about the relation between slow music, apathetic shopping center kids, lack of solidarity, being afraid of human touch, and how easily one can be manipulated by religious institutions...

Yeah, I'm only talking about my personal experience, perhaps you've met some great screamo, metalcore, or whatever that plays those slow breakdown songs and participated in a lot of cool initiatives and stuff, I just happened to, despite not liking the music at all, also not have a great experience with the scene... but anyway, stop being lame, FUCKING PLAY FAST!

Oh, Sony pulled yet another evil one recently, that every corporation hasn't stopped pulling for the last, what, half millennium? Every fucking CEO every-fucking-where in every fucking industry be like: "I know! Let's downgrade our products, keep the same price, and then charge more for our regular products and call them premium!"
- One sentence into my rant and I'm already digressing lol, but true to the heart, I just want them all to suffer horrible painful deaths because that's the merciful thing to do.

That Sony is a piece of shit, no wonder, what baffles me is how gamers praise Steam as if it ever sold any physical copies or isn't also just selling rental licenses instead of games and couldn't take them away whenever they feel like. Maybe you are dying to give old man Gabe a sloppy, but what about the shareholders taking the company after him?
  Steam hasn't been completely evil yet, I mean, who doesn't love kids getting hooked on casino games and spending money on loot box bets, right? And it seems to have good support for controllers and for Linux, like it's exceptional to expect that when they hold like 80% of the market, but the years of late-stage capitalism set the bar for anti-consumer practices so low that nobody bats an eye at the aggressive DRM.

DRM nowadays is used on the most dystopian products that we now consider regular and directly affects the right to repair, from agricultural machinery to your fucking printer. You have to hack and crack it so you don't have to buy a whole new one or an expensive-for-no-reason part because you can't fix it nor replace it with a third-party part because they locked everything behind DRM encryption and proprietary bullshit because they feel entitled to have control over the stuff you paid for... it gets even more dystopian when you know what they have been doing to seeds... yes, horrible painful death is merciful, they deserve a horrible painful life (digressing again, but fuck them CEOs).

Having to launch a program that will connect to the internet and do all kinds of checks and telemetry recordings, even check what else I have running on my machine, just so I can launch the program I actually want to launch while this other one is consuming my battery and RAM in the background is completely surreal to me - yeah, my age is showing, and you grew up with that and think it's normal, and I'm sorry for you. But the really surreal part of online stores is that you press a button saying "buy" but it's actually a lease and they are outwardly shamelessly lying to you, and you have no rights at all, no termination fee or shit. What Sony just did a few days before the latest announcement, by removing movies from their store and telling the users who "bought" them to go fuck themselves, all those online stores can do that whenever they feel like because you agreed to their terms.
  Imagine buying a hammer but you can only use it inside the store? It's like they say, you will own nothing and be happy.

Yeah, there are some games on Steam that are technically DRM-free, and if you learn what files to delete and move you can get a portable version of them without hacking or cracking, and maybe it's legal to do it? I have no idea how their licenses are, but I'd count on them being draconian even though technically there's no DRM check on the game.

The only alternative, besides the very few devs selling physical copies or copies on their own sites, is GOG, where they so far have a hardcore anti-DRM stance and won't sell games with DRM protection, and the money they make they spend recovering old titles and making them playable on modern hardware, games that they sell for cents because they are old games lol. After you buy and download a game from GOG you can tell them to go fuck themselves because you no longer need them for anything, you get your installer and can save on your computer, on an external HDD, a flash drive, on a cloud service you subscribe to, burn to CDs/DVDs/Blurays (they even break the games in 4gb parts so you can burn them on DVDs at home), it's yours and you can do whatever you want, you don't need their launcher to play, and that's how fucking games should be.

Standard GOG license says you are legally allowed to keep backup installation files unless the publisher agreement says otherwise. However, even if they said you can only keep one installer, with offline installation and no DRM check in any part of it, fuck if the publisher's legal team feels entitled to the files you paid for. Enforcement isn't just unlikely, it's impossible - and you still have legal control over one copy of it.
  If you make portable versions of the Steam games you bought, either because there are no checks or you cracked/emulated the checks, enforcement is also unlikely, but remember that you are one lobbyist away from having to agree to let their launcher probe further into your machine to check for tampered files or lose access to your account. You don't own the games they sold you, so if you think Sony is bad (and also Nintendo, Microsoft, Epic, Blizzard, Ubisoft, EA, etc, etc - yes, they all are), and you fear for game preservation and ownership, stop funding Steam. Don't give money to DRM-protected leased games. Fuck Steam! They are part of the problem.

ps: If you want to play a DRM-protected game, since you can't buy it, only lease it, the only morally correct thing to do is to pirate it.

Now, more than ever, we’ve got massive homogenizing weapons. The effects of radio and television pale in comparison to the mental conditioning pushed by social media, and the prospects for AI-based education are darker than any sci-fi cautionary tale could predict.

Just the other day, that silly Mr. Lovenstein strip was censored on Facebook for "encouraging violence" (above is the social-media-approved version). It would be understandable if Facebook were a place for toddlers, but you can’t even join under 13. What they’re saying is that adolescents and adults looking at this are too stupid and vulnerable to understand it’s a joke - and the comical consequence of that censorship is that, in one generation, adolescents and adults will actually be too stupid and vulnerable to understand it. But I’ll get to that later

In the comments, a user said "One time I was in FB jail for a week for a "Realistic threat of violence". What did I do? I said that people abusing helpless cats should have their legs [evicted] from [their nether regions] and have their heads [lovingly massaged] with those legs."

A realistic threat of violence, uh? In an increasingly online society, people are no longer allowed to rant or vent their frustrations and feelings truthfully and in a liberating way, for they’re punished for it. Although I can’t conceive of the effects this domestication and emotional suppression can have on art, this might not even be the worst part of this Pavlovian dystopia we’re living in. On the most popular platform ever, YouTube, newspeak is already a reality. If you say words like rape, suicide, genocide, torture, etc., you get your reach screwed, your videos removed, your channel demonetized, and finally you can get deplatformed. The consequence? Channels about history and war reporting are massively censored and removed... but what would be the consequences of this massive, worldwide Bowdlerization for society? Does sweeping ugly words under the rug eliminate the problems or just help hide them?

George Orwell comic adaptation by Fido Nesti. I hate to be That guy who says "This is just like 1984",
but sometimes it's just too ominous.

Everyone is policing their own words, the way and how they express themselves on the internet, afraid of the social sanctions it can impose. Unaware of "ungood", unironically unalived has already become a word for suicide.

The weird thing that no novel thought about is that this is being pushed not for a power project for an oppressive totalitarian State, nor a religious moralistic repression of humanity, no, Big Tech doesn't give a shit about that, it's all money. The stupidization of people is just a by-product of capitalism. Sponsors don't want to see their products advertised next to some themes, Coca-Cola doesn't want their ads next to a history channel talking about the Japanese massively raping Korean women during WWII and these women becoming pariahs in the Korean society, nor does McDonald's want their ads next to a cute bear talking about stabbing people, so these are a No-No.

We already have a whole adult generation raised on Big Tech thought control, everyone that had their childhood and early adolescence in the last 15 years was subjected to it, and man, interactions with individuals of that generation who were oversocialized in social media can often be painful. People who overly fixate on meaningless stuff because it's a taboo to them, it doesn't matter what context you say something, if you said something that is a Big Tech No-No their brains shut off and they can't comprehend it (kinda like people reading The Boys and completely missing what it is about just because of the violence, bad words and sex. Man, I always get back to it hahaha). Four years ago someone posted a question on a Soulseek community, asking if they could involuntarily download harmful files on it, and I said that OP (Original Poster) sounded like the kid who downloads LiNkIn-PaRk-NuMb.exe, referencing a popular P2P joke, as we were inside a P2P community, and then I proceeded to explain he chooses what files to download, he can see the file extensions, and then I gave my own list of banned extensions to avoid unwanted stuff. Since then three users messaged me to say I didn't have to be such an asshole about it, somehow every two years another person found the thread and got offended by it... yeah, they really thought my joke about LiNkIn-PaRk-NuMb.exe was offensive. For someone so unbelievable stupid infantilized, I guess that Mr. Lovenstein strip would indeed be confusing.

ps: About fixating on something and blocking the rest. They found the joke offensive and ignored the helpful advice. They can't form a coherent logical stream of thought that If I wanted to bully OP, Then I wouldn't help OP... also, I feel very sorry for full-grown adults who managed to find it offensive. It must be hell being so miserable and glass-half-empty that you see everything as an aggression.

My most recent interaction with this kind was on Letterboxd. When I was going to log Dogs in Space, a movie about the late '70s Melbourne punk scene, written and directed by someone who was there living in those shared houses, and who wanted to do an homage to a friend lost in those days. I saw a punk saying the movie wasn't really punk because [I have no idea what he considers "real punk"], and then I saw the same person saying the same thing about Suburbia, a movie written and directed by someone who was there living and documenting the early '80s Los Angeles punk scene, saying the movie didn't depict punks correctly, that despite the "visual side of punk is displayed relatively well" they did not understand anything about the punk subculture... I was baffled by the crap he was spouting, but instead of just calling him out, I just asked if he thought the same thing about The Decline of the Western Civilization, a 1981 documentary with everyone from the early LA punk scene, by the same director of Suburbia. And I recommended that he read some basics like Please Kill Me, Dance of Days, and collected editions of zines like Touch and Go and even Maximum Rocknroll, that are pretty easy to find, so he could broaden his vision of punk history, and said those movies depicted the punk scene of their times, and not the current punk scene.
  I also once knew nothing and thought I knew everything, but I met a lot of fantastic people in the punk scene, even those who mocked me for young-age ignorance and naivety helped me - because yeah, my brain is well-formed enough to discern a friendly mockery from bullying and aggression. I always liked reading and learning, and the natural consequence of learning is discovering you know shit. My introductory statement to this Letterboxd user was saying that I had been in the punk scene for more than 20 years and I'm still a novice, I didn't want to evoke some authoritative tone to what I was saying, I was just recommending reading material. I hoped we could talk about this subject I like so much. In those years I played in bands, I had a distro, promoted gigs, even with illegal energy connections at abandoned places, I got to host or help punk, hardcore, crossover, anarchopunk, crust and grind bands from the UK, Sweden, Italy, Japan and Canada (not to mention tons of locals bands from my continental-sized country), 15 years ago I actually had one of the most visited blogs where you could download Brazilian punk music at the time, with lots of stuff I ripped myself (all links long dead), I even had a short essay about the history of Street Punk and Oi!, which I wrote because of local gang violence I experienced myself, and I extensively talk about all the fascist and antifascist groups that formed the scene in the world, it was published and distributed by several anarchist presses here, and I know it was translated and distributed by an antifascist collective in Mexico as well (and I assume after the translation it might have reached other Latin American countries), and I list my lifetime of reading references to books and fanzines, no superficial wikipedia crap (if you are interested in reading it, it's in Portuguese and the language extremely colloquial, but AI translation tools are getting quite good these days, so here is the link). In my message to that user, seeing his complaints about homophobia in those movies, and knowing he is British, I referenced an interview of the British anarchopunk band The Apostles in the fanzine Homocore in 1989, mentioning how they were rejected by the anarchopunk scene in the early '80s when two of their members came out as gay, and that the band The Mob also suffered just because they lived in the same squat. So yeah, it wasn't just apolitical Oi! bands like The Business making fun of Tom Robinson, homophobia was a sad reality of the scene, even in the political side of it.

What happened? The guy deleted my comment and blocked me. He didn't want to know his view of "real punk" wasn't the absolute truth. The new generations are being raised in echo chambers, and even the slightest contradiction triggers them. They think it's an aggression. Those are the kind of adults we see having mental breakdowns and throwing tantrums when faced with adversity and opposition. You can't even have a normal conversation because they can't deal with anything that is not an echo chamber. Their anxiety rates are off the charts.

What about me? I'm also being pavloved. As I mentioned in the update of a previous rant, Facebook removed my page. Most strikes were about nudity and themes related to suicide. Anything that relates to suicide is a big No-No. These panels from the 1989 July edition of Heavy Metal was the last one, and it seemed to have been reviewed by humans after their bot flagged it... The kind of people that can read it and not understand it really scares me, because they are fucking idiots!

I police the images I post in my new Facebook page, I have now learned their censorship standards and I'm being able to avoid it fairly well, like a good well-behaved tamed drone. The only place I post whatever I want, and not treat the viewer as stupid, is my personal sites. I no longer share my personal life, what I'm doing or where I'm going on social media anyway, I only use it to share the movies and comics I like. But I don't censor my thoughts, and all this condescending conditioning can suck my cumdescending cock.

The most hilarious image that landed me a Facebook strike

By Wizard of Barge. I'm still not sure if it's encouraging violence or if it's pornography.

I have to start by saying that The Front Page is one of my favorite comedies ever.

I can't ignore His Girl Friday's huge cultural importance. It's a 1940 movie about a divorced woman with a career, and depending on how old you are, you might have no idea how many taboos it was breaking. In fact, it wasn't long ago that divorced women were treated like lepers; parents wouldn't let their kids hang out with kids from divorced women because they would be a bad influence and all that stupid conservative moralistic religious stuff. Also, it wasn't until recently that women started to be treated seriously in the workplace. Hildy is unapologetic, confident, fearless, competent, and respected for her work. She doesn't bow down to anyone, and she could be a poster girl for strong and independent women. But this is a comedy movie, and I'm here for laughs.

Often figuring in All Time Best Comedies' lists, and although being a good movie, it pales in comparison to the other two adaptations. I'm not going to complain about the gender swap, but how it's handled. Despite being the shorter movie, the first 30 minutes are all about setting the relationship between Hildy and Walter, reminiscing their past, and some half-assed divorcee jokes. It's basically 30 minutes of them discussing their relationship, leaving very little for the actual great story of the play. Although Rosalind Russell's performance is great, I don't think Cary Grant's delivery is good at all. He is just talking very fast all the time. Howard Hawks made a point of having fast dialogue, perhaps thinking it was the speed that created the intense chaotic hilarious atmosphere of the play, and not the events piling up one after another. In terms of pacing, I'd say the 1974 Billy Wilder adaptation does it best. You discover Hildy and Walter's relationship dynamics organically through the movie, and the story progresses steadily. I'd say Wilder also had some of the best jokes, like Walter cornering Peggy at the theater, and the family waiting at the train station. I also thought the removal of the annoying mother, to whom Walter was rather violent, and the addition of the novice reporter, which led to hilarious gags happening on the side of the screen, were great. Wilder's epilogue was also priceless. Ultimately, I think the best change was how Pincus/Pettibone/Plunkett was handled. While his last scene is a shameless Deus ex machina that barely fits the story in the other movies – I mean, the guy was going to come back in the morning – Plunkett being arrested while police sweep brothels just to win votes before the election, and they finding him in jail, was great.

There is one thing I don't think Wilder did best, and despite the great synergy between Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, and the best overall writing, the cast of the original 1931 Lewis Milestone film was perfect. I think everyone was portrayed better; yes, Hildy, Walter, and Pincus weren't as well written, but the Sheriff and the Mayor are way better, just like the convict and his girlfriend. I also found Bensinger a tad too stereotypical in Wilder's film and more balanced in Milestone's; I'd say the same for the psychiatrist.

Besides what I already said the 1974 version did better, there are some awkward things in the 1931 one, like the improvised singalongs by the characters and Hildy leaving the scene while dancing with the cleaning lady and spending an unexplained amount of time off-screen; I mean, how can they sing along to an improvisation? And that leaving-stage scene was a bad translation of the stage play. So overall, my favorite The Front Page is the third one – and this might be as unpopular as saying His Girl Friday is the worst. All Billy Wilder changes were for the better, but I don't think the side characters were as well handled as in the first movie. Meanwhile, His Girl Friday, despite the taboo breaking, there is nothing I can say it did better.

My parents come from different social circles, ranging from late 60s to early 80s cultural formation, both middle class, but one more on the lower, working-class side, and the other more on the upper, artistic side. In both circles, when I was still a child, I learned the same thing about what was supposed to be good movies: The likes of Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, Star Wars, RoboCop, Mad Max, Terminator, and whatever, were just silly action and adventure flicks to watch while eating popcorn with the kids. Now, stuff from directors like Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Tarkovsky, Kurosawa, Kubrick, Scorsese, Coppola, Buñuel, Bertolucci, etc., those were the movies for an adult night.

And that's true. As a kid, I loved the former and couldn't care less about the latter. That was always my perception of the difference between movies for kids and for adults. You can turn your brain off for one, whereas the other requires a bit of emotional maturity, life experience, and general knowledge to fully enjoy.

It seems I still shock people online when I say movies like RoboCop, Mad Max, and Terminator are for kids. No, I cannot conceive of these as mature movies at all. Yes, they have underlying social commentary and even raise interesting philosophical questions, but the same could be said about a bunch of children's cartoons. They are still just popcorn movies that don't require much attention. The rich background is what makes them good action flicks, but it doesn't make them "mature".

And as the culture shock goes both ways, I'm also shocked when I see comments like, "Oh, there is so much violence in Indiana Jones, it should be an 18+ movie."... Like, what the fuck!?
  I'm really convinced that this mindset is what created this bunch of infantilized adults we have today. They are so sheltered that they are simply not ready to deal with society... not because they didn't see enough violence in Indiana Jones, but because the bar for maturity is set stupidly low!

What prompted this rant is that I had just watched the 2019 Argentinian movie Scavenger and posted on a Classic Fallout community saying "What if Mad Max wasn't kid-friendly?", and called it a "bizarre B horror trash movie". Besides being massively downvoted, I also received a very upvoted comment saying "This isn't Mad Max for adults; it's Mad Max for people who think making half of your movie be just rape scenes is mature and gritty." ... Hell, I just called it a "bizarre B horror trash". While I do think Mad Max is kid-friendly (and discussion followed), I don't think a movie full of blood and gore, where everyone is a cannibal, and has violent rape scenes, is very kid-friendly - I mean, I think you should be at least 12 to watch this alone, or 10 if you sat through similar stuff with your parents before.

As I said in a previous rant, I'm glad I watched Kids in fifth grade with a teacher talking about sex, consent, protection, alcohol and drugs. Next, we would watch sixth graders doing a play on Christiane F.'s book, which our local translation included "Drug Addicted and Prostituted" in the title. Next year was our time to do the play... if I find those movies about sex, AIDS, alcohol, drugs and prostitution appropriate for children, as they are about children, then yes, Mad Max, RoboCop and Terminator are just silly popcorn movies.

The rape scene in Scavenger seems to be what really triggered the negative reaction in the Classic Fallout community. In all those popcorn action flicks, deemed mature by people raised on MPAA ratings, there is always a woman about to be raped by some evildoer, but the hero always shows up to save the day. It's crazy how this is seen as realistic, while the opposite is considered edgy - Ironically, being drugged and raped is something that can happen to you when playing Fallout 2 as a female character.

As is the usual reaction I see to The Boys comics, it really seems to be a problem of being sheltered, of reaching adulthood with so little world knowledge that anything raw and real seems edgy. Mad Max is a fantasy taking place in a world where those who have more guns make the laws, and we don't have to imagine this world, it already exists. I'm glad I was watching movies like Johnny Mad Dog, Angels of the Sun, Lord of War, City of God, The Last King of Scotland, Blood Diamond, and so on, in my adolescence, so that I got to see a bit of the real world. So when I see rape and cannibalism in a fantasy movie like Scavenger, I'm really not impressed - nor do I think it's being over-the-top. No, it's actually being closer to realism.

Hell, those movies I just listed are all 18+ in the USA as well. I don't just find them suitable for adolescents, I find them essential for adolescents, as they need to know the world outside their bubbles, so really fuck Indiana Jones being considered mature. Americans really put a lot of effort into treating kids like they are stupid and raising stupid adults. No wonder we see so many having mental breakdowns and throwing tantrums when faced with adversity and opposition. They wasted all the mental plasticity of young age and have grown up to be moral infants.

I was exploring comics online recently and discovered that someone translated these amazing Brazilian Mega Man comics from the '90s to English, and I also discovered the internet was shocked by it haha
  If you've read my previous rant, though, you already know we were raised a bit differently...

So the first video I watched was a very funny and short one by Death Battle with over 650k views already, but the really cool one is a two parter, almost one and a half hours long, by The Cellar, that analyzes the whole comic and tells a lot of cool stories about it. I had a few issues back then, but I didn't know any of this, so it was a really great watch. Both channels, though, highlight the insanity of the first writer José Roberto Pereira, also known as BK around here, and his "xenophobia".

So BK was very frustrated with early critics because of the poor quality of the comics - yeah, when I said "amazing" in the first line I was overselling it haha. It's pretty funny, though. People, and include myself in that, didn't understand why this third world project with literally zero funding, which was being made for free, didn't hold the same standards of Marvel productions with huge teams and tons of money behind. The Cellar points out how amazing this actually was, it was done by fans, some of whom were just teenagers - and others that ended up getting an international career in comics working for Marvel and DC. So you may think this was not a big deal, just a third world country, but at the time Brazil was the 5th most populated country in the world. Imagine being in high school and having a comic that you've drawn distributed nationwide in a country that big. That's pretty damn cool if you ask me, and as The Cellar says, with all its faults, the only thing this comic never felt like was "corporate". It was a very authentic work made out of pure love for comics.

Well, the other part is how BK complains about American comics, and how they were "destroying the Brazilian comic scene"... but what the hell is that!?

So I'm sure when BK is talking about American comics he is not actually talking about all comics from the USA, just the corporate, mass-produced, generic Marvel and DC superhero vanilla crap. I'm no scholar, but I think to talk about comics in Brazil we would have to start with a magazine from the early '70s called O Grilo - which the name already references local counterculture. It would publish Schulz's Peanuts side-by-side with other great American comic artists like Robert Crumb and Richard Corben, along with tons of European artists, and also Brazilian artists like Sérgio Macedo that went on to work in France with Métal Hurlant. So, yeah, kids reading Peanuts were also reading Fritz the Cat and a bunch of stuff with strong social and political commentary and takes on morals and ethics.

Another important context here that people may not know is that we lived under a bloody Military Dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. They killed journalists and intellectuals that they considered too subversive, arrested and tortured those that were too well known to get rid of, and dozens had to flee the country and live in exile. At the time we also had a newspaper called O Pasquim that was of huge political importance due to their opposition to the government, and everyone that worked there was arrested and kept in prison for months. No trials, no defense, no anything, they were just being bullied, and some big names of our comics worked there, like Ziraldo, Millôr Fernandes, Jaguar and Henfil. They were all put into surveillance and considered dangerous to the State because of their comics. Henfil's sister-in-law was arrested and tortured by the regime for being a leader of the students' movement, and after the physical torture they would play a record of children screaming and crying in the next room and claim they were torturing her daughter. There are real records of our dictatorship torturing pregnant women, little kids and even babies, so she lived in real fear not knowing what happened to her child. After protests, the political prisoners acquired the right to one hour of sunbathing and to read the newspapers, aware of this Henfil made a little comic strip that was published in a newspaper with a guy telling a kid "Juliana, stop eating so much strawberry ice cream, you are going to have the shits!" so this seemingly silly strip depicting a casual, relatable life interaction, that was humorous because of the informal language used in a newspaper, allowed his sister-in-law to know that her daughter Juliana was with him, she was safe and having a lot of strawberry ice cream... and I can't even imagine how much it meant to that mother... you know, going back to my previous rant and that comic about moral infants, I catch myself thinking about grown-ass men saying they got emotional when Captain America lifted Thor's hammer... then I think about comics here being repressed for being a threat to fascism, and being used to bring hope and peace to political prisoners. Henfil's little comic strips became the symbol of the democracy movement, and the slogan he created "Diretas Já!" started with only a few dozen people in 1983 and ended up with a million and a half marching for democracy in 1984. The Brazilian comic scene meant counterculture and resistance!

"We want to vote" "Go back home, the people are illegal"

During the Dictatorship we had real government censorship agencies, newspapers would publish cake recipes when their news were censored, musicians would sing "La La La" when their lyrics were censored, and so on, so they had to be really smart to be able to get a message across. In 1985, though, with the end of those dark years, censorship was no more and other great comic artists like Angeli, Laerte, Glauco and Luiz Gê started a magazine called Chiclete Com Banana, where nothing was too sacred to not be made fun of and being sued by politicians and religious authorities was just another Tuesday. Another publication I can highlight is Níquel Náusea with names like Fernando Gonsales and Spacca, who also worked on O Pasquim and Radar. Comics at the time were highly connected to counterculture, there were stories with hippies, punks, beatniks, jazz musicians, they'd talk about social and moral themes and didn't shy away from sex and drugs. Our comic scene was subversive as fuck!

So there was another thing going on during that time, something pushed by our corporate mass media. I feel like my parents' generation had a far richer cultural background in the '60s and '70s. Stuff coming from the USA represented a big portion of what was consumed here but not the biggest. It wasn't just local art, we would watch movies and listen to music and read comics and books coming from Europe and Latin America as well, and it was here because it was good not because it was part of a media bundle. Quino's Mafalda was immensely popular, and I feel like that generation has a really good grasp of history and geography just by growing up reading Asterix and Tintin - instead of crap like Superman. Somewhen during the '80s it changed, mass media conglomerates got exclusive contracts, we started to only import stuff from USA, and during the '90s when I grew up all that was on TV, movies, radio and comic book stands were corporate American productions. We even had a name for it, we called it the "American canned goods", because they all felt like mass-produced industrialized crap. And here is where BK's rant about American comics destroying the Brazilian comic scene comes into place:

Chiclete Com Banana ended in 1991 but it continued with a magazine called Tipinhos Inúteis. It died in 1995, though. Níquel Náusea died in 1996. That year Novas Aventuras de Megaman started being published, a work with absolutely no backing, and we see BK's rant. So publishers and sponsors could put their money on cheap bland industrialized corporate American canned goods they didn't need to produce, that came with a huge marketing aided by TV cartoons, movies, toy lines, clothing lines, footwear lines, video games, fucking cereals, chicken nuggets and shampoo bottles to help the sales... or they could put their money on local artists with none of that... what do you think happened? Do you still think BK was just being xenophobic?

Don't get me wrong, I was a part of it, I was a kid in the '90s and I loved everything related to X-Men and Spider-Man, but a few years later when I was in high school and got my hands on some Chiclete Com Banana I saw a completely new and authentic world. It was daring, informative, thought-provoking, subversive, and already buried by corporate media.

It's worth mentioning that there was one last breath for local comics in the late '90s, although it was already very disconnected from that subversive and transgressive comic scene from the '70s till the mid '90s in the vein of European and underground American comics, and linked to manga and Japanese culture instead - surfing in the local anime explosion of the time. Besides Mega Man, somehow Brazilian artists got the rights to make Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat comics as well, and those had a far higher level of production. Trama Editorial did an amazing job holding the line, but it fell by the mid '00s.
  I have to mention too, although periodical publications aimed at older kids, teens and young adults died out, when it comes to comics aimed at little kids nothing has ever beaten A Turma da Mônica here (Monica's Gang, by Mauricio de Souza). Many of us learned how to read with it.

Back to Mega Man, which I absolutely love, my main exposure to it as a kid was with a cousin who had Mega Man 7 for SNES, where our hero is out of fucks and was straight up going to murder Wily in the ending, and Mega Man X5 for PS1 that another cousin acquired a few years later. With all the robot uprising and post-apocalyptic background adding to the New Adventures of Megaman I had read a few issues, I always thought the series was darker and more mature. It was a big disappointment when I got to read American and Japanese Mega Man comics in recent years and discovered it's actually very silly and childish.

ps: Another Brazilian comic I find legendary is Banda Grossa, for this one I wasn't too late to the party, and I read it when it was released in 2006, and it was only possible because they got public funding, but it turns out that they told the city they were going to make a tourist's guide to hotels and restaurants and when they were cleared to press they sent their comics instead haha
  Besides being sued by the city, they were also sued by religious organizations. Among other stories, one that left a mark on me was "Armless Jesus". In the first part he is taking a shit and calls his mother "Mommy, I finished." and she says "Go clean your son, Joseph." to which Joseph replies "Oh, so now the son is mine!?". In the last part he finally rose to the challenge to fulfill his destiny. He is captured by the Romans and is going to be crucified... but how, if he has no arms!?
  Checkmate!
  These are great comics right there!

ps²: That disturbing Mega Man page at the start, I put it there just for shock, but it's not anything pedo. She was just a homeless orphan that was kidnapped with other girls and was chosen to be cut open and have her organs sold in the black market while her brain is used for human experimentation. Nothing to worry about.
  I had that issue, it made me quite sad because I loved Roll and she suffered a lot... I also always thought this was canon haha

ps³: I briefly mentioned Ziraldo. When I was a kid I didn't know his work on O Pasquim and how dangerous he was considered to fascism, being arrested three times by the regime. He died this last April (2024) and I just want to take this opportunity to thank and praise him. O Menino Maluquinho (The Nutty Boy) was the first book I ever read and was my absolute childhood favorite.

"And that’s when everyone discovered that he hadn’t been a nutty boy.
He had actually been a happy boy!"

Update: I was talking to my mother about this, and she told me that when she was in middle school, in the '60s, there was a very popular comic book artist among kids, Carlos Zéfiro. His distribution was limited, so he was mainly found in the big cities, but there was a comic book stand near every school, where kids could acquire it... the stories? Some very nasty taboo porn!
  His comics were nicknamed the "catechesis", as it was most kids' introduction to sex in the '50s, '60s and '70s. Legends say that at some point some kids from higher-ups in the government were caught with it, and the comic was forced to add a "Strictly prohibited for minors under 18 years of age" sticker to the cover - which, of course, meant jack shit.
  Another important context about our dictatorship's censorship is that it was very political, they didn't want anyone questioning or denouncing the regime, its corruption and crimes, but they weren't overly culturally moralistic, in fact, the most popular movies being made at the time were of a genre we called Pornochanchada, which was softcore porn comedies mostly involving taboo themes. The government quite liked people being distracted by pornography, as it moved the focus from previous highly subversive movies like the Oscar nominee and Palm d'Or winner O Pagador de Promessas (The Given Word), and the Palm d'Or nominees Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil) and Vidas Secas (Barren Lives).

I have posted Genocyber a few times already in my blog/page, and I find it funny how shocking it is to the world that this aired in an over-the-air kid's show at 6pm between Sailor Moon and Saint Seiya, and any kid of any age could watch in my country. I was even called a liar because people can't conceive entertainment without massive censorship and control... well, a great writer here once said there is no sin on the south of the Equator, and to talk about it I will have to talk about growing up in the wild lands of Brazil before globalization and internet culture taking over.

Often I'm talking to foreign friends and I feel they find it kinda weird me mentioning reading stuff like Spawn when I was 8 years old or so, or having watched Akira and Genocyber even before that, like I'm trying to sound tough, "I was hardcore since I was little", but no, this was just Brazil.
  The culture shock goes both ways. I was very surprised to discover that stuff like RoboCop and Terminator are 18+ in the USA, while I always thought they were just regular movies any kid could and should watch. I remember taking my RoboCop doll to school in the first grade, and I didn't know any kid that hadn't watched those, because they were on over-the-air TV in the afternoon with Tremors, Predator and so. In my perception it was all movies for kids and teens, while movies for adults were romances and dramas with intricate plots and character development that actually required some emotional and rational maturity to enjoy - not dumb action stuff.
  I only discovered people in other countries actually cared about movie ratings when I saw a controversy about Deadpool. Some local celebrity was criticized over the internet for watching it with his kid while the movie was supposed to be 18+, it was quite shocking because with all that juvenile humor I could swear their target audience was 12yos... this controversy would be unthinkable here until the end of the 2000s and the rise of social media in the 2010s. Then I discovered how fucking stupidly dumb these fanatical ratings are, that lock a bunch of important coming-of-age themes outside of teenager's reach; movies like Ken Park, Thirteen and even fuckin' Christiane F. are barred to the audience that should be watching them - not to mention Trainspotting and Requiem for a Dream, that have done a way better job than any corny D.A.R.E. campaign. I'm very glad I watched Kids at school in fifth grade with a teacher talking about sex and drugs, and it's NC-17 in the USA, as if it's at 18 that you should be having that talk... no surprise, the most religious states are the ones with the highest teenage pregnancy and STD rates.

So back to movies: It's not just the kids that could watch anything, I never met a parent or video store clerk that cared unless they were extremely religious - you know, the kind that thinks Harry Potter is satanic. Sleepovers were a very common thing, so we'd rent some movie for the night, "Oh, the kids want to watch Hellraiser? Whatever, just don't wet the bed". The only thing that was really restricted was porn, and I mean hardcore porn because hardly anyone cared about softcore porn either. Kids having Playboy magazines wasn't such a taboo, although not something we'd show our parents, they'd just pretend not to know. There was a TV channel that would show softcore porn after midnight one day of the week and this was the talk the next day at school, "Hey, did you watch the last episode of Emmanuelle in Space?" - there was a day they showed a hentai, it was a big event and I missed it. Everyone was shocked by how bizarre it was and all I know is that, at some point, the demon tentacle monster that was raping girls gets a giant dick and destroys a building with it, and I hate having missed it haha

But how nobody cared? Well, this is Brazil, and Carnaval is really big and traditional here. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have huge parades they spend the whole year preparing for it and it's shown live on TV. A lot of celebrities and other people that participate in those parades go completely naked, with only bodypaint over the genitals - yes, on prime time live TV, and a month before it our biggest TV channel puts a short video at every damn commercial break all day long with the Globeleza girl dancing naked, telling people to watch the Carnaval. Here is a short collection of clips from 1992 to 2002

The foreign friends I showed this couldn't believe it, the thought of some naked lady dancing all day long on TV and any kid being able to watch it haha - and honestly, the only thought I ever had about it is that it was annoying, that damn song playing all day long.
  But it was just nudity, no spread genitals and penetrations, this was actually considered tasteful because nudity wasn't such a taboo, it was normal in art and life. From heroic nudity in Hellenistic and Roman art, to Renaissance and Liberty Leading the People, the world wasn't so fucking prude as the stupid puritan USA's dark ages culture being dictated now through Twitter's trending topics. From Ness in Earthbound needing pajamas because he was naked on his dream, the censorship of whole humorous sequences of little Goku's willy in the original Dragon Ball, to controversy over the Nevermind's album cover, who the hell looks at a naked child and think "hmmm... sex...". Kurt Cobain's compromise for censorship was a sticker over the baby's penis saying "If you're offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile.", and he was absolutely right.

ps: Remember back in 2004, when Janet Jackson had her clothes ripped accidentally and flashed a nipple on live American TV, and because of that she was blacklisted and became public enemy number one, having her career terminated? This episode seemed so ludicrous to me. All that fuss because of a nipple? Those people are sick...

I only got familiar with the USA's political discourses and trends when I got to Facebook in 2011 or so, and I was shocked by the moralism of even the so called progressives. All the parts in that discussion, well, they felt like the grown up version of the kid from the 1998 comic at the beginning of this post... so fucking sheltered from everything that they can't conceive anything different from the little bubbles they were raised in and respond to everything as either being outraged or triggered. No wonder, the culture these fuckers were raised in didn't get them to use their brains until it was too late, everything was put out of range and being called "mature". If you treat kids like they are stupid, you are raising stupid adults.
  I feel like the reaction to The Boys comics, which I talked in this post, is also caused by that. The stuff on it is so alien to the readers that they think it's "edgy", but, hell, if you didn't grow up as a stupid sheltered kid then you don't get shocked by the sex and violence and understand it's just conveying humor through the absurd and you can actually see the story, the political and social commentary, the parodies and everything else on it.

I don't think censoring and sheltering is only so explicit and direct, although creating taboos over words without context is another culture shock for me - yeah calling someone a nigger and a faggot is offensive and a jerky thing to do, but the words themselves aren't offensive, they are just fucking words, and calling it "n-word" and "f-word" - not to mention the so fucking feared "f-bomb" - sets a dangerous precedent to a neurotic moralistic culture. The Boys TV show is also a good example of sheltering: Butcher's father would be a prime example of toxic masculinity, he considered any sensitivity and attempt to show emotions a weakness, something for faggots, he was proud of being stupid and violent, and would get drunk and beat his wife and kids. Butcher was raised to be stupid and violent as well, he was a drunkard emotionally castrated bully that would pick fights at random because he hated himself, and was on fast track to become his father until he met a woman with more clit than he had balls, but they couldn't have an ignorant brute calling other people fags in the TV show, so instead that character is a Spice Girls' fan...
  Butcher calling everyone fag, poof, dyke, etc, is actually very pertinent to his character. He was raised like that, people are raised like that, they exist doesn't matter how much you try to shelter kids from it (Limp Wrist's Thick SkinFrailty
Equals fatality
Callus those fists
Sharpen your tongues
Grow it thick, kid, grow it thick

Bubbles Pop
Your allies left your block
No shields to hide behind
You’ve only got you on your side
Grow it thick, kid, grow it thick

Don’t be the world’s punching bag
A defenseless queer open for attack
Thick skin, they can’t get through
Layer upon layer, they can’t get through song comes to mind), and because he is not being directly prejudicial towards gays, lesbians, and so, he doesn't think he is being homophobic for using those slurs. Another important part of the comics is that Hughie is very annoyed by Butcher's words, but when they get into a gay club it's Hughie that gets uncomfortable, so his higher moral ground claim was, as it always is in real life, just a big hypocritical virtue signaling. This is later revisited when Hughie goes back to his home town and discovers his childhood friend is transsexual, and he is forced to face his prejudices... well, all discussions left out of the show because they can't have a "hero" saying the "f-word".
  And this veiled sheltering is way more common than you think, look for example at Hollywood adaptations of Insomnia and Open Your Eyes (Vanilla Sky), both movies have asshole main characters that USA tried to turn into tragic and sympathetic for its audience. Let the assholes be assholes, we don't have to identify with every main character. Let's rationalize and think about action and choices, about morality and ethics, instead of trying to get us emotional.

So, back to not being treated like an idiot when growing up, but just for a bit of culture shock: There was a band here called Mamonas Assassinas that'd play every other weekend on popular live TV shows. They were literally a band made for kids, and they had very explicit songs making jokes about orgies (Vira-Vira) and zoophilia (Mundo Animal), among other stuff, things that were fun for you to joke about if you were six or so, but it was a bit awkward if you were still a fan at ten or twelve, because it was a band for little kids. Their song RoboCop Gay might be a bit of a mindfuck to modern politics, because it's sung by a satirical stereotypical ultra gay character to make the kids laugh, followed by an anti-homophobia chorus saying anyone can be gay and you have to accept it - even when they are ultra gay.
  But apart from little kids singing Mamonas Assassinas songs on TV, like the Vira-Vira chorus that goes like "Turn, turn and spin, spread the circle and come, in this damn orgy they already grabbed my ass, and I still haven't fucked anyone", what I truly find beautiful, more than Globeleza and Genocyber (and other stuff like Banheira do Gugu, that would have celebrities playing games and getting naked live on TV every Sunday after church), is this video of the metal punk band Ratos de Porão singing a song about alcohol abuse, drug addiction, violence, depression and suicide on a kid's show in 1991. Yep, we weren't sheltered in the least.

I was in fifth grade I had this English homework to use a Portuguese-English dictionary to translate a song of our choice and present it to the class. I picked Paranoid from Black Sabbath, which a cousin of mine had recorded on a cassette for me - thankfully all that stupid satanic panic from the USA missed us here too. The lyrics are a bit disturbing for a 10yo? Well, not something that any adult mentioned, as I said we weren't treated like idiots and I could rationalize and understand it, but anyway, I realized translating songs wasn't so hard, and even though I probably got a lot of things wrong, I started translating the songs from the CDs I had at home: Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails... stuff my older siblings had, and there were songs with some deep psychological and philosophical themes that just got me thinking about their meanings.
  My mom was really into esoteric stuff, she knew how to make all the calculations to draw astrological charts, had books about Kabbalah, would tell me how the Church altered the Bible to hide that the first woman was Lilith, and she was punished by God and sent to the dark side of the moon because she didn't want to submit to Adam for they were made from the same clay, so God created Eva from Adam... anyway, I was 12yo when I first watched Evangelion and I was like "Cool, a cartoon I can totally relate to!" and then I go on the internet today and read a bunch of grown-ass people saying stuff like "Oh, I just watched Evangelion and it fucked up my mind", "I need therapy", and I really wonder how sheltered those people were growing up, how can themes on Evangelion be so alien that it's disturbing to them. Yeah, my previous contact with esoteric stuff was a privilege on my part, but the psychological part should be everywhere in movies and music - and damn inside of us, if we stop to think for a minute, unless the parents hid everything following the MPAA ratings and Parental Advisory stickers and prevented their kids from ever trying to fucking use their brains!

I've seen people saying Evangelion is not for kids... but it's a coming-of-age show, it relates to kids reaching puberty. Sorry if you were stupid back then.
  Obviously I also saw people calling it edgy.
  Nope. You are just a sheltered normie.

UPDATE

I was randomly contacted about this text (a positive reply), and it got me thinking more about the change of times toward prudery and moralism, and the globalization of WASP-culture shame and guilt addiction through social media. I often post frames from the Watchmen movie on my page, and from time to time this follower tells the story of watching it in the cinema, where a parent and his kid sat behind him. When Dr. Manhattan showed up naked, the kid gasped, and the parent would have some explaining to do that night... it feels really weird to me that a kid old enough to be in a cinema watching Watchmen had never seen a naked man before. Then I looked online and saw forums where people discussed how to explain the bath scene from My Neighbor Totoro to their kids, and I realized that some people are so weird about nudity that they can't even shower or bathe with their own kids. These kids grow up completely alienated from nudity, and when they see it, they get shocked because they find it unnatural.
  The observable effect of creating a taboo around nudity is people who can't separate nudity from pornography and eroticism. If you grow up with nudity being something natural and part of life, it's not something that fazes you, but if it was always considered a taboo and something to be hidden, then nudity shocks and outrages you.

I believe our old approach to nudity derived a lot from our native cultures, which were traditionally nude, and depictions of the natives in media and books were always nude because that was their rightful way and nobody batted an eye. When kids were learning about the natives and painting their faces to celebrate Dia dos Povos Indígenas (Indigenous People's Day), we'd always see pictures and drawings of natives, and they were fully naked, so nudity was not treated as weird or something to be hidden. Then there is also Carnaval, which I already talked about, with lots of artistic nudity... that doesn't mean nudity was accepted in any other context, but for natives and for art, nudity wasn't a big deal – I remember having extracurricular drawing classes when I was in second grade or so, and right after learning how to draw shadows on an apple, we went on to draw a Vitruvian Man and Woman to learn body proportions.

There was a kids' TV show here called Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum. In one episode, they told a native folklore tale, and the two native kids playing it, probably aged between 6 and 8 years old, were naked the whole time. I can only imagine the kind of uproar this would have caused in the USA, but the sad truth is that nowadays it would cause the same uproar here. I remember going naked to pools when I was a little kid, and it wasn't a rare sight to see other little kids naked in pools or on the beach. Of course the parents were always together, and if someone were to look weird at the kids, they'd be lynched. I believe the general sentiment was that kids were sexless entities, so no problem in them being naked, and no one batted an eye.

I know Brazil wasn't the only place to have this sexless view of nudity, as movies like Black Moon (Germany and France), Medea (Italy), and El Topo (Mexico) also have it. I recently watched Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia), and it's a very cute and whimsical story about a girl on childhood's threshold imagining romance and adventures with heroes and villains. I could really see Hayao Miyazaki animating it, for its dreamy atmosphere reminded me a lot of Spirited Away, but the girl is naked in one scene, and when I went to log the movie on Letterboxd, I saw all the commentary about pedophilia and blah blah blah. In the movies mentioned here, as well as in those Japanese productions I mentioned before, and even cherubs in Renaissance art, nudity represents purity and innocence, but people raised on taboos see nudity and think about sex. They can't separate it from pornography. The filth is in their heads.

And what's the social media impact? Media used to be local, but now it's under global moderation and global peer pressure. You know Globeleza, the girl dancing naked on television in every commercial break near Carnaval? The last time she was naked was 2016, and they killed the character in 2022. I went to check celebrities that were naked in Carnaval, and I was particularly looking for Dercy Gonçalves, a famous Brazilian comedian who went naked for her homage when she was 84 years old, and the pictures of those celebrities were censored on the site lol. We watched it all live on TV, but now the nudity is offensive.
  All our big media gets the majority of its traffic from social media, and what used to be normal here can get you strikes, screw your reach, get you demonetized, deplatformed, etc., so we have to conform to US cultural standards and not do anything that could trigger the American Sunday after-church crowd, even in snippets from an article – and all of us are getting Pavloved by its moderation. Back in 2014 or so, there were some Evangelical freaks, backed by some politicians, complaining about an art presentation in a museum that had nude people, saying it offended the traditional Brazilian family. I posted a picture of the traditional Brazilian family, some naked natives, and it quickly reached a few hundred thousand shares, and the next hour I was banned for a month for pornography haha. My Facebook page Ȧ͓p̟̩ͯo͇͓ͥ̇ċa̝̫͆̾̇l͉̰̅ͅy̠̤͒p͔͖͒̅͌̊ṱ̟̬ͥi͉͓͎͚͑c H͛ͅe̼̬ͤa̳ͣd̩͛ had 40k followers and I lost it due to a bunch of strikes related to nudity and had to start anew, and I don't even post erotic stuff, it was just art that happened to contain nudity, and even though the Terms of Service say it's ok, in reality they censor it. What we used to consider perfectly family-friendly here is 18+ by US standards, and the social media standards are our new cultural standards. I fear kids growing up here today are going to have the same repressed views of nudity of American kids.

Why should the great be constrained by the small?

BioShock is one of my favorite games ever, and it's taking so long for me to post it in the blog because I wanted to really dedicate myself replaying it. I don't think the following observation of BioShock characters is controversial like the rest of the content of this blog, though, unless you think Ryan is cool somehow...

I'm sure Ryan thinks he is a "self-made man" and it was the sweat of his brow that built his fortune, and not finding oil in his property. He has a lot of views about himself and so proudly boasts and babbles them. Socially inept, he built himself the image of the hero he wanted to be, and pathetically spent all his money to convince people of it, but he is none of that. No, Ryan is not a cold individualist that only cares about himself, he pretends to be, but he is actually an attention whore craving acceptance, and that's why he built a city and invited people in instead of building himself an ivory tower surrounded by armed men and doing whatever the fuck he wants there with no one to bother. Like all adepts of his ideology, Ryan is completely delusional about the world and people, he judges them to be as petty and small as himself, and created his whole character revolving around it. He blames other people and institutions for not being the hero he believes to be, and in his Mad Max-fantasy ideal world, where he will finally be able to be the hero he dreams of, people will abide by unwritten and unenforced rules like "non-aggression principle" and whatever, because otherwise, weaklings like him would succumb... but why should the great be constrained by the small?

Then comes Fontaine, the heroic self-made man from Ryan's fantasy. Whenever Ryan talks about his virtues he is actually describing his nemesis. Fontaine was an orphan, no family to support him nor properties and luck, he had to struggle and sweat for everything he conquered, and didn't let anyone or anything stand in his way, because he indeed only cared about himself and wasn't some frustrated attention whore. Little Ryan so firmly believed to not be a sheep, he left the door open for the real wolf.

Let's not talk about how incoherent it was to hold a monopoly by force, labeling contraband the free commerce, covering it with patriotic lies - such as doing it to protect their homeland from foreign menaces, and then taking over through violence the business of a man who built everything from scratch using only his intellect and will. Let's just remember Ryan saying "My strength is not in steel and fire, but in my intellect and will" - hehehe. In truth, people only cared about Ryan while he could provide them with his cool resort for them to enjoy. Even after spending all his money, it was Fontaine who really conquered the people's hearts, and he wasn't afraid of reinventing himself and starting from the bottom again, always beating Ryan at his own game even with Ryan changing the rules whenever he was cornered. Ryan spent his fortune and life to build a city, babbling some ideological fantasy, wanting people to adore him, and Fontaine just came with nothing and conquered not just the people, but also the market that Ryan so thought himself to be the master of. I believe the best word to describe Ryan, used by his real-world ideological partners, is "beta cuck".

In his last moment, Ryan decided that it didn't matter that you were going to murder him, because right before it he chose to be murdered, so he won and you lost. Checkmate, collectivists!

I wasn't a kid when I watched those shows for the first time, so I got nostalgia glasses for neither. I watched The Last Airbender on TV when it was coming out, The Legend of Korra I watched a few years after it was completed, but hadn't rewatched them till I started this page. Watching stuff for a second time always gives me a different perspective, there are movies and shows that I came to appreciate way more after a second watch, and others way less. Korra is definitely a show I came to appreciate more.

First is the animation, a total killer. Coming out later there was a lot of technology to help Korra look amazing. Better lighting, particles, and a lot of 3D effects for vehicles, buildings, props and background in general, that helps a lot with depth and dimension, but the overall directing for fighting and action scenes is also on another level. From the whole bending to aerial dogfights and people flying and being thrown while the camera flies through the scene... I can't really compare it to any other western TV animation series from its time or before.

The story and characters are way more mature. And this here is personal preference, but I like how dynamic and unpredictable it is - whereas Aang is an Epic, and in the 30-second opening it already tells you all you are going to be watching on its 61 episodes. Honestly, by how rich the story of each season of Korra is, any of them could be stretched into an epic too. The villains are also on another level. I love Azula, but Ozai is pretty unremarkable, they had a lot of time to build his character but he was ignored. Amon, Taarlock and Zaheer, on the other hand, are great! - well, I find Unalaq and Kuvira just ok, but still more interesting than Ozai.

I feel like Korra falls short in synergy between characters. Having way more of them, while an average 13 episodes per season, also doesn't help. Yeah, Mako, Bolin and Asami can't really compete with how great Katara, Sokka and Toph were together, and there is also the issue that the characters in Korra are always drifting apart, and they didn't get whole episodes for each to develop them further like The Last Airbender did, so the main cast is not as memorable, but I find Korra a way more interesting character than Aang - and, Iroh aside, same for the supporting cast.

Fandoms tend to be just toxic congregations of manchildren sucking hard on the nostalgia cock, proclaiming whatever they watched when they were kids is the best thing ever and everything released after is shit (so many big franchises are on this endless cycle...). I remember back in the day Korra got a lot of hate, it was Avatar but it wasn't Aang so "Booo!", but Korra is a fantastic series, with way more mature and serious characters and better written villains and story in general. The Legend of Korra is way cooler than Avatar: The Last Airbender!

This was written before the fourth season of the show and the second Trump term,
both made things worse... holy fuck, how worse!

The Comics:

Man, whenever I post The Boys on the page now it seems to be a trigger. I don't know if Ennis was canceled by internet folks or what, but tons of random people jump in to say how much they hate Ennis and everything he writes. Funnily enough, in my last post, you could see both people complaining that he is a libertarian and that he is a communist... seems like when they dislike something, they try to label it as their political opposition... same people that call Ennis childish...

It really seems that most people get shocked while reading. They get uncomfortable with slurs, violence, sex jokes, etc. It's hard to conceive how fucking sheltered you have to be to lack the emotional maturity to handle that, and get hurt by words instead, but what surprises me the most is that they thought they were going to be reading a Rated-G Super Friends comic? One wouldn't go watch a horror movie and then complain there was too much killing and blood, so why would one read a black comedy by Garth Ennis and say there is too much depravity?

My current description for The Boys comic's posts is: "A dark and cynical satire of the superhero genre, exposing the corruption and depravity of powerful people left unchecked.
  Another Garth Ennis pitch dark black comedy with a powerful social commentary. Say what you will, The Boys is the best superhero story written after Watchmen."

I'm baiting, but also not baiting, with the last sentence. The Boys is a fantastic and incredibly down-to-earth story. We have powerful people on Earth, they joyride with their supercars, kill people and get away with it, use their influence and position of authority to abuse power... if you read too many superhero comics you may think powerful people would form a Justice League or Avenger Initiative, but what they really do is Epstein's Islands. If looking at the real world makes you uncomfortable, perhaps you have to grow up.

Really, the vast majority of comments say it's just sex and violence, a story "written by a 13yo" for "edgelords" and "incels". Meanwhile, the first issue the comics discuss is rape. But it's not rape in the way it's usually perceived by society, as forceful or with threat of violence, but rape using influence. A woman is thrown in the middle of powerful, self-centered, men and is presented with the "choice" of being raped or kissing goodbye to her career and everything she ever worked for her entire life... Ennis brought this discussion to the comics medium, of all places, way way before #metoo was even a mainstream topic. How men just get away with it, having a whole system built to protect them, and a stupid society that, even now, still thinks it wasn't rape because they didn't threaten her with physical violence. Starlight had a very conservative upbringing, that both taught her to be ashamed of her sexuality and to just submit and accept that men are like that. Her development shows her breaking free from her indoctrination and understanding how she was being abused - even by the company selling her image. Yeah, Ennis also touches the theme of hypersexualization of heroines in the comic book medium, very pertinent, especially after we had guys like Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld breaking comic sales records in the 90s. She develops her self-esteem, learns how to stand up for herself, and even develops a healthy and positive sexuality on her own terms... how the hell is that a story for "incels"? "Edgelords"? It really seems the average reader is just plain dumb, and all the themes touched go right over their heads because the imagery used is too graphic for their sheltered minds raised on Christian-approved entertainment.

It seems that most people read The Boys and think it's a "What if superheroes were bad?", but it's a parallel of real-world powerful people: Corporations corrupting the government, poisoning communities with chemicals, military-industrial war machine complex and its billionaire contracts, normal people as acceptable collateral damage for profits. Ennis is not being "edgy"; he is talking about Blackwater, Monsanto, Hollywood, Wall Street, about the real world... the way it's all ignored and reduced to superheroes being killed, I can only assume all the themes are really going over people's head - or they are too damn ignorant to even know what this is about.

Ah, yeah. Ennis takes a big and well-deserved shit on the superhero genre as well, making a parody of its most common and generic tropes, because here is the truest of truths: Superhero comics suck!
  If you read my Comics section, I say there that I've read a lot of superhero comics when I was a kid. I collected most of the Marvel stuff from the 90s, but I wasn't ever really into Avengers and Fantastic Four related stuff, even then I found them boring, as uninteresting god-like characters and perfect beacons of morality (which is even truer for Justice League, and why I never got into DC). I was really into X-Men, a ragtag group with really diverse personalities and dealing with a lot of personal problems, and Spider-Man, a broke ass dude, with an asshole boss, trying to get a girlfriend. From X-Men and Spider-Man I also had tons of stuff from the 80s and 70s I bought for cents at second-hand stores. I'm a well versed in the medium, and of course there are great stories here in there, but the medium itself sucks, it thrives on black and white absolute morals for kids, and endless repeating mind-numbing tropes. After some time reading superhero comics I realized that none of what was happening really mattered, every intense emotional and tipping point by a writer was nullified by another one the next year, every character had died and came back to life, gone bad and forgiven, infinite universes destroyed and recreated, everything is of no consequence at all. Superhero stories are great when written by guys that are there to break conventions, to write novels, to put an end to their stories, but when written by superhero fans you get endless more-of-the-same happening again and again. "The good guys beat the bad guys again. Hurray!", or a pissing contest about which character can hold more exploding suns up their butts: "My character can bench press the sun", "Oh yeah? My character can bench press three hundred and two thousand billions suns", "Oh yeah? My character can hold six zeptabillions black holes on his hand!", "So what, my character can run four quadrupedzillions the speed of light", "Oh yeah, and my character can destroy the universe", "And my character can destroy 52 of them!"... it's incredible the mediocre childish stuff that pass as "good comics" by people who hate the likes of Ennis...

I've got a bit sidetracked on the rant there, but back to The Boys: Perhaps all the violence and harsh humor isn't for you, doesn't suit your taste, gross you out, or whatever, all good with that, but like I said before: One wouldn't go watch a horror movie and then complain there was too much killing and blood, so why would one read a black comedy by Garth Ennis and say there is too much depravity? Just skip the comics if it's not your thing. I really don't get how it's so controversial.

The TV show:

The same way people so vehemently hate the comics, they also love the show... What!?

I'm really convinced people that hate the comics BUT really love the TV show only do that because how the show portrays their current political adversaries, and for that they ignore the gaping holes in character development. Yeah, all the dumbfucks in the cult that worships Homelander are actually the dumbfucks in the cult that worshipes Trump, it's not even subtle.

The show is a complete watered down version of the comics, they diminish the impact of the most important stuff on Vought's background. I really feel like it's avoiding criticizing war-driven economy, government corruption and military contracts after the first season (you can't really pin it down on Trump [again, this was written before his second term], but how much money did Biden administration funnel to the war that broke off right after his election, and was in a country his family had involvement in shady business?), and instead focuses on political marketing, celebrity culture, culture and information war (now, this you can pin on Trump!). But all the shock value, gory violence and crass humor is there... people exploding everywhere, blood baths left and right, brains falling out while a guy is eating ass, gill rape, bestiality, a baby used as a weapon... what really seems to be different is that the show makes fun of Trump's cult - and the comics don't (hell, it ran from 2006 to 2012. It pokes a lot of fun at Bush, though, but who cares in present times?).

If only the Amazon series could decide if Homelander had mommy issues, daddy issues, or if, in fact, he is not attention-seeking at all and wants to give the spotlight to his son; and if the Boys were a methodical and pragmatic group or a disoriented bunch acting illogically on emotions… yeah, the character development and the writing is pretty bad. I really liked the first and second seasons, watered down, but really enjoyable. The third season, however, is a clusterfuck of bad writing.

Stillwell is one of my favorite comic book characters ever. In the show they made him a woman, and that was ok, because Homelander got this hilarious Oedipus Complex going on. But since they killed his plot device in the first season, they had to come up with something else, and out of nowhere, they try to emulate his relationship with Stillwell from the comics with Edgar, a character he didn't give two fucks about up until that point but now was craving his approval... What? They forgot his drive was the Oedipus Complex!?
  Also, his own son is no different from Stillwell's son: Someone competing for attention. But now Homelander wants to give love instead of receiving it? ... What!?

But what really bothers me is how the whole group went full retard in the third season... you have M.M. trying to pick a fight with Soldier Boy, even though he knows he can't do shit, and that Soldier Boy is their best chance against Homelander. Everyone getting mad at Butcher for doing exactly what he has to do, like everybody lost all their resolve and character. In the last fight no one even knew who they were up against, they were just fighting aimless, even fucking Butcher pulled a Star-Lord out of nowhere and stopped Soldier Boy when he was about to fry all the V in Homelander and Ryan's blood and solve all their fucking problems... What!?!? Is that what they consider way better writing than the comics? This mediocre basic TV writing for mediocre basic TV audiences that can't handle "good" characters acting on logic and objectives instead of emotion and morality? No, just no, that's the opposite of The Boys, what you really consider "better writing" is the swings on Trump.

Conclusion:

A lot of people also talk about Ennis being pessimistic, nihilistic, misanthropic, etc. Pretty weird how the only two genuinely good characters were the ones that prevailed and managed to get a happy ending. The Boys is incredibly optimistic lol.

And the lesson learned is that, for next The Boys comics posts, I'm going to limit comments to followers only from the start. I don't need other hundreds of shocked vanilla normies swarming in.

... wait a minute, all this buzz just increases my reach. Complain all you want. Dance, monkeys, dance.