From my experience you're right. I've had to haul enough of my buds to the hospital after getting in drunk fistfights or falls down the stairs that it really does seem like more of a chore than some heroic stuff. That said when I look at the guys who did the same for me when I nearly died of a brain infection I can't help but feel the opposite way about them. I think the humble man's perception of himself is usually a lot lower than his friend's perception of him.
You’ve highlighted why Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man will always be the best version of that character. It reflects the essential arc of Stan and Steve’s original run. The truth of Peter Parker is that he’s a little pervert. A creepy nerd who wanted to get rich off his insane powers by beating up wrestlers on TV for money. But then his uncle gets shot so his power fantasy turns into a nightmare and the only way to keep justifying running around in spandex and Peter Panning away his life is to beat up criminals in dark alleys for free. He stays a dick and grapples with the fact that people think he’s a bigger dick for saving people and even quits a few times before deciding he’s not quite ready to grow up (justified as “the city needs me”) and returning to his real life video games.
Unlike the rest of the marvel universe, who either find a way to make superheroing their job or at least get grownup life handled enough to make it their hobby, Spidey is perpetually using the Vulture or Doc Ock as his excuse for being a terribly unreliable friend, bf, employee, student, nephew, etc…
Steve and Stan recognized that the fantasy element isn’t as real as the responsibilities Peter has as a human. I believe the comics were initially trying to teach something of actionable value. Uncle Ben’s speech isn’t about being obligated to save the world because you have the abilities of a spider, he probably thought Peter was skipping school to masturbate (which he basically was). The responsibilities and powers he was referring to were those nearly all humans have, I.e. using your brain to be a morally accountable individual to friends, family, and society.
The problem is that they made the comic for money, and it turned out that there would be no end to the story so long as they chose to cater to man-child fantasies of being secretly awesome in order to keep making it. Just imagine if this had been a European comic, or a pre-90s Japanese manga. Each villain battle or monster of the week fight would get less fantastic and more gruesome aka “real” until Peter realized that there is no acceptable way to be a violent lunatic, that his fantasy of being “The Amazing Spider-Man” is just porn and thus unsatisfying when enacted for real.
The deeper epiphany for Spidey would have been that at some point every true man has to give up his little perversions which he enjoys in private and go out into the light as an example to be followed. At this point he would undergo a great struggle and either lose the powers or give up using them, because the point of adulthood is realizing that you don’t need an imaginary edge over everybody else to be special, you just need to be fully yourself with the bodies who matter.
> Just imagine if this had been a... pre-90s Japanese manga.
How can some of those comic go on as long as decades without much development, "monster of the week" becomes a kind of quasi-wagie statis of labor rather than craft or action (repetitive work rather than cementing the past or pathing the future).
> you don’t need an imaginary edge over everybody else to be special, you just need to be fully yourself with the bodies who matter
Rao's "Curse of Development" mean that training ones weak points are the ultimate goal at curing proclivities towards being a special snowflake. Paradoxically that would also mean that self-proclaimed "talented life long learners" demonstrates a symptom of serious mental or developmental disabilities beyond ones control.
Question: Why is Deadpool considered funny, and how is cynicism in its original intention seen as a virtue above the mental masturbation of "Marvel Heroism"? Did the media industry dilute that line of thinking as well?
When I wrote "European comic or pre-90s Japanese manga" I should have been more specific. I was thinking more of works like 'The Incal' or "Mazinger Z" and "Neon Genesis Evangelion" (admittedly a 90s work). Stories in which the protagonist experiences growth and the series eventually ends. Eva in particular, being a deconstruction of the giant robot genre by an auteur undergoing an existential crisis, offers some interesting ways out of the fantasy land since multiple endings were tried, none of which have been wholly satisfying to its fanbase.
Coming from a 3.0+1.0 fan (Mari based) is that there is no appeasing the crowd that is half intellectually savvy and half consoomer. The latter always want a platonically happy ending and not a poetically melancholic one, and definitely not one that is lecture-y.
All revisionism is futile til everything is Calarts and Marvel.
Admittedly, I haven't finished the latest movies but I think Anno is very aware of this problem and the fact that this iteration's Eva pilots can't physically age out of adolescence is his commentary on contemporary society's juvenile entertainments and our unwillingness to mentally grow up.
I think during the first run he kinda outgrew the genre he was working in, which is why his next anime was a high school dramedy (aka the genre Shinji chose for himself at the series' conclusion). It was a commercial flop. The Rebuild series is basically a compromise: Anno gets back in the damn robot and milks whatever passion he has left for giant mech anime to fund his studio's indie projects. This would explain why the action sequences are comparatively soulless when viewed next to the original's: the director isn't interested in telling the story through violence and handed it to someone else.
A small recap: Bland violence (what sensory-deprived consumers want) transitioning into a Nolan or Fincher flick of mind game proportions (what intellectual wants). At the end everyone moved on in their life in a fourth wall breaking sense.
The reason why high school genre work is ignored, is paradoxically its consumerist value for an over-worked lethargic crowd, with too many other better options. Anno is more apt as a cult film maker, which bleeds into its cultural successor Studio Trigger. Anything that has the faint smell of truth or pretentiousness is inherently inferior in the eyes of the larger masses.
This strategic move from "premium mediocre" art forms (pop philosophy as Evangelion) into more "domestic cozy" forms of mediocrity (works of "love") inherently a profit-killer. The working class style of Bandai and Shogakukan works in Japan is crass, yet the spread of high philosophy (Rebuilds) is not a revenue-bringer even if it is very culturally valuable when done correctly.
Articulated soullessness therefore, is the best thing Anno can offer. Normalcy cannot be faked as presentative normalcy has its own norms and cultural chic. My hypothesis is that art that resonates the strongest cannot be made by those who are happy and sincere within that specific field. People prefer expressive pastiche over impressionism or realism.
For example, Anno was married to another artist after the original Evangelion, and that coincides with him desire to pump out love stories. Oddly enough love stories that are too flowery or saccharine are often less enjoyable, but meditations/critiques on loneliness with aesthetic visuals are still well received disregarding the bitterness.
And what do we see now about popular love stories? Simping in every corner, from Rent-a-Girlfriend to Chainsawman (both authors are not right in the head BTW), where the phantasy of courting or following ("objectifying") women is prioritized over the joy of maintaining relationship in and of itself. Desire triumphs over having.
It is not a place to flaunt ones relationship, or champion "couples therapy", of which the latter is basically the premise of Spy x Family as a part of the cliché espionage genre. In some sense the Looks Like X (pastiche) but is Really Y (intentionality) pattern also fits Rebuild, as the end of 3.0+1.0 is Anno's stand-in announcing the joys for his marriage and the usual "touch grass" warning.
Very astute! I’ll have to watch the end of 3.0+1.0 to see if I agree.
As for the latest crop of anime, I see Anno as their grand daddy, him being one of the first true otaku creator media darlings of anime. As much as we all love the feel-good story of the boy who gets to make what he loved. The competitive nature of that industry has made it so that you have to be a total weirdo obsessed to an unhealthy degree with what you love in order to even have a shot at getting noticed. Hence, Chainsaw Man and Mob Psycho. Both of which are ultimately about seeking conformity while retaining extraordinary superpowers (which I suppose, when you are a mangaka who can make a living at it in Japan, must seem like an incredible ability in itself).
Very awakening! The concept of "cost-benefit analysis" AKA cost-cutting is particularly unvirtuous.
> If you do a “good deed”, that doesn't mean you “deserve” or “get a good deed in return”. It means you did violence upon Nature, and Nature, seeking equilibrium, will punish you.
In essence, the natural order is how it is, but not how it ought to be. For some reason the same mistake has been made for both hedonism/modernism (ignoring pain) and waldenponding/anprim thinking (escaping responsibility). https://archive.ph/JZYPkhttps://archive.ph/QM1znhttps://archive.ph/qlOsn
> The concept of heroism is only really attractive without a victim... these things are not ways to try aim at the Good – they are ways of avoiding the Good. They are not ways of serving the most Good possible, but ways to determine “what is the least amount I have do to, to qualify as good”.
Here is the assumption that one would make if the people who are compelled by "EA" are just normal people, I highly suspect that the adherents are partially brain-dead idiots who need some ways to do good, not that they are unwilling, but more so they are incapable or inept. There are some characteristic of these peoples: they are more likely to be: paranoid neurotic wordcels (having high "verbal tilt" and low chance of classical autism), lacks self-awareness and kindness (conscientiousness and agreeableness), are prestige-driven but have "no class" in the cultural sense (lower gentry or working middle class background), believe in credentials and bureaucracies over autodidactic excellence, prefer content and products over art and beauty, half-asses on everything, have simultaneous tone-deaf delusions and excessive envy of technology (especially AI), and have excessive desire to drive crowds.
A weird problem emerges for these midwits/clueless/idealists/gentry/"nerds": They want to be given a "Marvel Hero's Journey" to be a good person, but at the same time IF they have the physical ability to do so, it is the lack of mental and social fortitude that is the main problem, and worse is that there may never be a true cure for this. This explains why people worship Peterson's persona (or any e-dads), or follow Tate's antics (or any self-help grifter), before just "doing the acts of living". The opposing side to this is of course everything from social justice to wokeness to neo-altruism, instead of "instant heroism" the only alternative is collective anti-villainy, where virtue is almost impossible to act upon correctly.
Regarding their behavior: they are narrative/subjectively driven, not skepticism/empiricism driven, yet masquerading the latter as the former. This leads to faking both disabilities for sympathies (self-diagnosis, ADHD as "illness") and genius for their try-hard pride ("head girl syndrome"), whilst discriminating those who are in need of help and hating the sincerely wise. Fear of Being Ordinary (FOBO) is narcissistic but vulnerable and not grandiose, as it cannot tolerate being cleaved from the populares and pursuit greatness for its sake. Solitude becomes its form of half-baked anti-heroism ala "we live in a society" types.
Q: would it be reasonable that there is an ideology that are fit to cage those that are mentally broken like this? Villainy proper as per "the system" bare naked, or pseudo-antiheroism, where they are being promised ways of boasting their own ego but duped into acting in a more sane and virtuous way? Or is this too idealistic as well?
Interesting food for thought .
I sometimes freeze, other times I take care of whatever I can do to help .
You're mostly right about the bigger picture .
-Nate
i'm glad you still found a way to show off what you did by posting this and creating a narrative in which you're superior
jk u did a good, dear andy/spidermang
(it's ok to feel good about it)
TSUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Running around like Ronaldo after a goal we're so back man what an article
From my experience you're right. I've had to haul enough of my buds to the hospital after getting in drunk fistfights or falls down the stairs that it really does seem like more of a chore than some heroic stuff. That said when I look at the guys who did the same for me when I nearly died of a brain infection I can't help but feel the opposite way about them. I think the humble man's perception of himself is usually a lot lower than his friend's perception of him.
Ur on fire lately
You’ve highlighted why Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man will always be the best version of that character. It reflects the essential arc of Stan and Steve’s original run. The truth of Peter Parker is that he’s a little pervert. A creepy nerd who wanted to get rich off his insane powers by beating up wrestlers on TV for money. But then his uncle gets shot so his power fantasy turns into a nightmare and the only way to keep justifying running around in spandex and Peter Panning away his life is to beat up criminals in dark alleys for free. He stays a dick and grapples with the fact that people think he’s a bigger dick for saving people and even quits a few times before deciding he’s not quite ready to grow up (justified as “the city needs me”) and returning to his real life video games.
Unlike the rest of the marvel universe, who either find a way to make superheroing their job or at least get grownup life handled enough to make it their hobby, Spidey is perpetually using the Vulture or Doc Ock as his excuse for being a terribly unreliable friend, bf, employee, student, nephew, etc…
Steve and Stan recognized that the fantasy element isn’t as real as the responsibilities Peter has as a human. I believe the comics were initially trying to teach something of actionable value. Uncle Ben’s speech isn’t about being obligated to save the world because you have the abilities of a spider, he probably thought Peter was skipping school to masturbate (which he basically was). The responsibilities and powers he was referring to were those nearly all humans have, I.e. using your brain to be a morally accountable individual to friends, family, and society.
The problem is that they made the comic for money, and it turned out that there would be no end to the story so long as they chose to cater to man-child fantasies of being secretly awesome in order to keep making it. Just imagine if this had been a European comic, or a pre-90s Japanese manga. Each villain battle or monster of the week fight would get less fantastic and more gruesome aka “real” until Peter realized that there is no acceptable way to be a violent lunatic, that his fantasy of being “The Amazing Spider-Man” is just porn and thus unsatisfying when enacted for real.
The deeper epiphany for Spidey would have been that at some point every true man has to give up his little perversions which he enjoys in private and go out into the light as an example to be followed. At this point he would undergo a great struggle and either lose the powers or give up using them, because the point of adulthood is realizing that you don’t need an imaginary edge over everybody else to be special, you just need to be fully yourself with the bodies who matter.
> Just imagine if this had been a... pre-90s Japanese manga.
How can some of those comic go on as long as decades without much development, "monster of the week" becomes a kind of quasi-wagie statis of labor rather than craft or action (repetitive work rather than cementing the past or pathing the future).
> you don’t need an imaginary edge over everybody else to be special, you just need to be fully yourself with the bodies who matter
Rao's "Curse of Development" mean that training ones weak points are the ultimate goal at curing proclivities towards being a special snowflake. Paradoxically that would also mean that self-proclaimed "talented life long learners" demonstrates a symptom of serious mental or developmental disabilities beyond ones control.
Question: Why is Deadpool considered funny, and how is cynicism in its original intention seen as a virtue above the mental masturbation of "Marvel Heroism"? Did the media industry dilute that line of thinking as well?
I like your thoughts!
When I wrote "European comic or pre-90s Japanese manga" I should have been more specific. I was thinking more of works like 'The Incal' or "Mazinger Z" and "Neon Genesis Evangelion" (admittedly a 90s work). Stories in which the protagonist experiences growth and the series eventually ends. Eva in particular, being a deconstruction of the giant robot genre by an auteur undergoing an existential crisis, offers some interesting ways out of the fantasy land since multiple endings were tried, none of which have been wholly satisfying to its fanbase.
Coming from a 3.0+1.0 fan (Mari based) is that there is no appeasing the crowd that is half intellectually savvy and half consoomer. The latter always want a platonically happy ending and not a poetically melancholic one, and definitely not one that is lecture-y.
All revisionism is futile til everything is Calarts and Marvel.
Admittedly, I haven't finished the latest movies but I think Anno is very aware of this problem and the fact that this iteration's Eva pilots can't physically age out of adolescence is his commentary on contemporary society's juvenile entertainments and our unwillingness to mentally grow up.
I think during the first run he kinda outgrew the genre he was working in, which is why his next anime was a high school dramedy (aka the genre Shinji chose for himself at the series' conclusion). It was a commercial flop. The Rebuild series is basically a compromise: Anno gets back in the damn robot and milks whatever passion he has left for giant mech anime to fund his studio's indie projects. This would explain why the action sequences are comparatively soulless when viewed next to the original's: the director isn't interested in telling the story through violence and handed it to someone else.
A small recap: Bland violence (what sensory-deprived consumers want) transitioning into a Nolan or Fincher flick of mind game proportions (what intellectual wants). At the end everyone moved on in their life in a fourth wall breaking sense.
The reason why high school genre work is ignored, is paradoxically its consumerist value for an over-worked lethargic crowd, with too many other better options. Anno is more apt as a cult film maker, which bleeds into its cultural successor Studio Trigger. Anything that has the faint smell of truth or pretentiousness is inherently inferior in the eyes of the larger masses.
This strategic move from "premium mediocre" art forms (pop philosophy as Evangelion) into more "domestic cozy" forms of mediocrity (works of "love") inherently a profit-killer. The working class style of Bandai and Shogakukan works in Japan is crass, yet the spread of high philosophy (Rebuilds) is not a revenue-bringer even if it is very culturally valuable when done correctly.
Articulated soullessness therefore, is the best thing Anno can offer. Normalcy cannot be faked as presentative normalcy has its own norms and cultural chic. My hypothesis is that art that resonates the strongest cannot be made by those who are happy and sincere within that specific field. People prefer expressive pastiche over impressionism or realism.
For example, Anno was married to another artist after the original Evangelion, and that coincides with him desire to pump out love stories. Oddly enough love stories that are too flowery or saccharine are often less enjoyable, but meditations/critiques on loneliness with aesthetic visuals are still well received disregarding the bitterness.
And what do we see now about popular love stories? Simping in every corner, from Rent-a-Girlfriend to Chainsawman (both authors are not right in the head BTW), where the phantasy of courting or following ("objectifying") women is prioritized over the joy of maintaining relationship in and of itself. Desire triumphs over having.
It is not a place to flaunt ones relationship, or champion "couples therapy", of which the latter is basically the premise of Spy x Family as a part of the cliché espionage genre. In some sense the Looks Like X (pastiche) but is Really Y (intentionality) pattern also fits Rebuild, as the end of 3.0+1.0 is Anno's stand-in announcing the joys for his marriage and the usual "touch grass" warning.
Very astute! I’ll have to watch the end of 3.0+1.0 to see if I agree.
As for the latest crop of anime, I see Anno as their grand daddy, him being one of the first true otaku creator media darlings of anime. As much as we all love the feel-good story of the boy who gets to make what he loved. The competitive nature of that industry has made it so that you have to be a total weirdo obsessed to an unhealthy degree with what you love in order to even have a shot at getting noticed. Hence, Chainsaw Man and Mob Psycho. Both of which are ultimately about seeking conformity while retaining extraordinary superpowers (which I suppose, when you are a mangaka who can make a living at it in Japan, must seem like an incredible ability in itself).
Very awakening! The concept of "cost-benefit analysis" AKA cost-cutting is particularly unvirtuous.
> If you do a “good deed”, that doesn't mean you “deserve” or “get a good deed in return”. It means you did violence upon Nature, and Nature, seeking equilibrium, will punish you.
In essence, the natural order is how it is, but not how it ought to be. For some reason the same mistake has been made for both hedonism/modernism (ignoring pain) and waldenponding/anprim thinking (escaping responsibility). https://archive.ph/JZYPk https://archive.ph/QM1zn https://archive.ph/qlOsn
> The concept of heroism is only really attractive without a victim... these things are not ways to try aim at the Good – they are ways of avoiding the Good. They are not ways of serving the most Good possible, but ways to determine “what is the least amount I have do to, to qualify as good”.
Here is the assumption that one would make if the people who are compelled by "EA" are just normal people, I highly suspect that the adherents are partially brain-dead idiots who need some ways to do good, not that they are unwilling, but more so they are incapable or inept. There are some characteristic of these peoples: they are more likely to be: paranoid neurotic wordcels (having high "verbal tilt" and low chance of classical autism), lacks self-awareness and kindness (conscientiousness and agreeableness), are prestige-driven but have "no class" in the cultural sense (lower gentry or working middle class background), believe in credentials and bureaucracies over autodidactic excellence, prefer content and products over art and beauty, half-asses on everything, have simultaneous tone-deaf delusions and excessive envy of technology (especially AI), and have excessive desire to drive crowds.
A weird problem emerges for these midwits/clueless/idealists/gentry/"nerds": They want to be given a "Marvel Hero's Journey" to be a good person, but at the same time IF they have the physical ability to do so, it is the lack of mental and social fortitude that is the main problem, and worse is that there may never be a true cure for this. This explains why people worship Peterson's persona (or any e-dads), or follow Tate's antics (or any self-help grifter), before just "doing the acts of living". The opposing side to this is of course everything from social justice to wokeness to neo-altruism, instead of "instant heroism" the only alternative is collective anti-villainy, where virtue is almost impossible to act upon correctly.
Regarding their behavior: they are narrative/subjectively driven, not skepticism/empiricism driven, yet masquerading the latter as the former. This leads to faking both disabilities for sympathies (self-diagnosis, ADHD as "illness") and genius for their try-hard pride ("head girl syndrome"), whilst discriminating those who are in need of help and hating the sincerely wise. Fear of Being Ordinary (FOBO) is narcissistic but vulnerable and not grandiose, as it cannot tolerate being cleaved from the populares and pursuit greatness for its sake. Solitude becomes its form of half-baked anti-heroism ala "we live in a society" types.
Q: would it be reasonable that there is an ideology that are fit to cage those that are mentally broken like this? Villainy proper as per "the system" bare naked, or pseudo-antiheroism, where they are being promised ways of boasting their own ego but duped into acting in a more sane and virtuous way? Or is this too idealistic as well?
https://halfassed.science.blog/2021/09/25/is-ea-a-mental-illness/ https://www.secondbest.ca/p/why-im-not-exactly-an-effective-altruist https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/ https://normielisation.substack.com/p/personal-cheems-mindset https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk https://iqpersonalitygenius.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-head-girl-syndrome-opposite-of.html https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-01829-x
P.S. For another windbaggy breakdown https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/im-trying-to-figure-out-why-i-dont/comment/11024373
"Talking to a cute girl, and realising that she has discovered something about who you really are? That is terrifying." Some real truth there.
Wtf randy. You never talked about how big the punishment would be.
Congrats, good job saving a life