When the Divergent movie came out, my response was a resounding "huh." I'd read the books, and I thought they were pretty generic. I assumed it would go the way of so many adaptations before: it'd get a single movie that flopped and everyone would forget about them. But now it's gotten a second movie. And a third to complete the tri--oh, wait, no, four movies. Because of course they're splitting the last movie into two, as is popular these days.
That's when I said that it's time to speak out against this series. It's obviously more popular than I gave it credit for, and that's a bad thing, because I think the books are generic at best and ideologically dangerous at worst. So here's why you shouldn't support the Divergent Trilogy:
1. The books are generic
Remember how big Twilight got? Remember how that led to a slew of so many imitators that bookstores stocked "paranormal teen romance" sections? YA dystopias are going the same way. The popularity of The Hunger Games has led to an increased demand in the market for dystopias, and the Divergent Trilogy is just another one of these. They, unfortunately, bring very little new to the table. It's hard not to compare them to The Hunger Games, considering the first person present tense female narrator, or the "this is our world's future" premise, or the idea of people being segregated. And in the ways it, uh, "diverges" from similar stories? Genetic engineering? Wow, boring. Soooo boring.
2. The books are not well-written
It takes three books to justify the idea of splitting people into factions based on singular personality traits, and "genetic engineering" isn't really a good answer. It's a thought experiment, but one that is ultimately pointless because it's based on something that would never happen and doesn't even raise many important questions. What exactly is it trying to ask? "What do we become when we invest our identities in a single idea?" That's such an asinine question to ask. It's a flimsy premise that takes three books to get to the point, and by the time they get to the point, readers have already had two books to consider all the plot holes. The characters are largely one-dimensional by the very design of the system. Such mediocrity should not be encouraged with money.
3. It's a blatant cash-in
When the Harry Potter films the last book into two movies, they had six previous installments based on some pretty hefty books. Maybe it was an attempt to milk fans for more money, but it's just as reasonable to believe that it was an attempt to give fans a more complete experience. There were plenty of plot threads that needed wrapping up that had been built up over previous films. Since then, that's become the norm with adaptations, with movies being drug out and split into multiple parts for the sake of squeezing more money from consumers. Breaking Dawn, The Hobbit, Mockingjay...and now Allegiant. This pattern should not be supported. It's simply a way to milk a cash cow until it's dry, and filmmakers are going to continue doing it as long as we keep letting them.
4. They're ideologically dangerous
The Divergent Trilogy is mostly inoffensive for the first two books, but the third book has a lot of issues that seem downright dangerous. The plot of the third book focuses primarily on the people escaping the city discovering that being divergent marks a certain level of genetic healing, meaning those who aren't divergent aren't "healed." The scientists studying the city are considering using some sort of memory serum to reset the experiment, which understandably makes the group of escapees upset. The tone shifts to "how dare they tell us we're broken? We need to revolt!" Allegiant is very obviously aware of marginalized groups, as it includes some openly gay characters and there are themes that parallel the struggles of the gay community, but the context of the parallel and how it is ultimately handled both have major issues. First of all, the scientists are attempting to heal genetic damage, which has done major damage to the world. Most of the series up to this point has been "it's dangerous when you are reduced to just a few corruptible personality traits." But now, it's become the exact opposite: "you are fine as you are and don't let anyone else tell you differently." What happened to the earlier warnings? Have they suddenly become irrelevant? Allegiant completely ignores the possibility that who someone is could possibly be dangerous or harmful.
Secondly, the way the issue is handled is horribly dangerous and downright hypocritical. The issue is solved when the city group uses the memory serum on the scientists before they can use it on the city, and then fill in the gaps in their memories by telling them "this is what we want to do but we're going to pretend it's what you wanted to do." The message this sends is literally "if you think that a change you're attempting to affect is right, you should brainwash the people who disagree into agreeing with you." This is a terrible message to be sending. I don't have to explain why this is a dangerous ideology, do I?
And that's why you should not support the Divergent trilogy. Maybe you're still interested and want to check it out. Whatever. That's fine. I just ask that you borrow or pirate rather than give monetary support. There are certain things that should not be supported. And mediocre, money-grabbing, and ideologically dangerous series like the Divergent trilogy need to be sent messages.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Psycho-Pass 2 Review
It's been too long since I've written something for this blog, and while I have maybe four or five half-finished posts that I haven't published yet because I plan to put more effort into them, I figured I'd toss off a quick anime review.
Let's talk about Psycho-Pass. Psycho-Pass is is a 2012 original anime by Gen Urobuchi of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero fame. Urobuchi is one of my favorite anime writers, and I thought Psycho-Pass was incredible. It's a dystopian world where something called the Sibyl System controls crime by monitoring people's mental state and their criminal tendencies. Think Minority Report meets Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It makes plenty of allusions to the works that it draws its inspiration from, from Plato to Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad and more. The series takes a look at what it means to be a human, how we should interact with a heavily digital society, and what relationship law and ethics should have.
Psycho-Pass 2, which aired in 2014, is basically Psycho-Pass devoid of everything that made it great. It lack's Urobuchi's involvement, which probably should have been the first red flag. But that didn't necessarily mean it would have been bad. Maybe it could have had a solid storyline and good characters. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, many of the best characters from the first season were dead or indisposed and most the other established characters had to be left alone so that they could be used in the then-upcoming movie (which Gen Urobuchi was involved with). So the story had to be carried by the new cast members. Which were, uh...pretty awful.
Without going into too much detail since it involves spoilers for the first season, most of the cast was well-established and had at least some purpose in the story. I've always thought that characters were Urobuchi's strongest points. He doesn't write easily-identifiable and fun caricatures like you see in lots of anime. His characters have some subtlety and nuance to them, and viewers have to work a bit harder to understand them, but can enjoy them more fully if they put in that effort. The characters in PP2? They pretty much exist to drive the plot (which is...not great) or fill out the cast.
Of course, not all characters are necessarily bad at the beginning. At the beginning, I was still hopefully optimistic. Episode 4 is when I abandoned hope. A bunch of hostages are caught in a situation that causes their crime coefficients to rise to levels indicating that they are about to instigate violent crimes. Dominators, the weapons the police use, are set to stun and contain criminals at a certain level and set to kill at a certain level. It's a safety mechanism that protects the people so that lethal force isn't accidentally used. However, as these citizens all blindly rush out of the building in a panic, their crime coefficients elevated, the police massacre them all. Why is this happening? There's something highly abnormal about this. Have no situations like this ever happened before? One would think that the police have procedures for dealing with hostage situations in which victims might become temporarily stressed. But no, that scene needed to be there, because something needed to make she show feel edgy, since the new writer has confused that for being good.
The edginess continues through the series. One of the major plotlines is a villain in the force attempting to make Akane's psycho-pass darker. Why? What good does that do? Why Akane? There is literally no purpose to the plotline other than "it's dark."
Psycho-Pass 2 feels like a single arc of Psycho-Pass stretched out into 11 episodes. It had the potential to be good, but in order to fill time, it took far too long getting to the point, and when it finally did get to the point, the point turned out to contradict a lot of what had previously been established. In theory, the season boiled down to a variation of the God Paradox, i.e., "if God can do anything, can he create a boulder so heavy that he can't lift it?" In this case, the villain, Kamui, asked "if Sibyl is all-judging, how would it judge itself?"
In attempting to answer this question, Psycho-Pass 2 completely changes what "criminally asymptomatic" means, and gives a convoluted answer to the question in the process. The obvious answer, based on what the first season previously established, would be "it doesn't need to because Sibyl is the embodiment of the law and the law is above judgment." But Psycho-Pass 2 sets up a scenario where Sibyl fails to judge a man whose internal organs are a conglomerate of individuals, similar to how Sibyl itself operates. Let's ignore how absolutely stupid this is for a few moments and focus on how Sibyl reacts. Sibyl says "well, we'll judge each of the individuals that are part of you individually, and we'll also judge ourselves individually and eliminate the brains that are raising our crime coefficients." Except that shouldn't happen, because the Sibyl System consists of criminally asymptomatic brains that can't be judged by the Sibyl System. There should not be brains capable of raising its crime coefficient. But of course that shouldn't be surprising, since the writers of Psycho-Pass 2 seem to have no concept of what "criminally asymptomatic" means, considering that Togane is somehow considered criminally asymptomatic while simultaneously having the highest crime coefficient recorded. This is literally the opposite of what criminally asymptomatic has been established to mean. Criminally asymptomatic people have hues that don't match their actions. A murderer like season 1's Makishima is criminally asymptomatic because he has a clear psycho-pass, and I suppose a good person who somehow has a dark psycho-pass would also theoretically be criminally asymptomatic. But having a high crime coefficient is something you would expect from a character who killed puppies as a child. That's not hyperbole, by the way. There is a scene where we literally see Togane murdering puppies as a child. I mean, seriously? Is there a more heavy-handed yet also generic way to establish that he's evil?
Let's come back to our villain, Kamui: he was the only survivor of a plane crash as a child who was saved by surgery that put the organs of the other 184 students who did not survive the plane crash into his body. Let's ignore things like compatibility of blood types and just assume that this somehow works. The result is that he cannot be detected by the Sibyl System because...he's not one person or something. Also, the season is set up around this idea of judging a collective. A collective of brains is wholly different from a collective of organs. A collective of organs should not affect anything the show tries to portray it as affecting. People who have heart or kidney transplants do not undergo random personality changes because they have other people's organs in them. There's probably research to back this up, but I don't need it because it should be obvious to pretty much everyone that this very concept of this happening is absolutely fucking stupid.
So let's recap what exactly we've established with Psycho-Pass 2:
-It focuses more on being dark and edgy than making sense
-It contradicts things that have been previously established in the series
-It's built on a premise that is not only fallacious, but makes no logical sense, either.
There are plenty of other small things I could go into, but those three points alone are enough to condemn the show. Psycho-Pass was an incredibly thoughtful show that, despite sci-fi elements not necessarily grounded in reality, at least stayed consistent. Psycho-Pass 2 is basically Psycho-Pass devoid of everything that made Psycho-Pass good. Does that make Psycho-Pass 2 bad? I honestly can't tell, because I cannot divorce it from Psycho-Pass, and relative to Psycho-Pass, it's bad. But hey, at least Urobuchi's still involved in the movie! Hopefully it doesn't suck when it's finally released here.
Let's talk about Psycho-Pass. Psycho-Pass is is a 2012 original anime by Gen Urobuchi of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Fate/Zero fame. Urobuchi is one of my favorite anime writers, and I thought Psycho-Pass was incredible. It's a dystopian world where something called the Sibyl System controls crime by monitoring people's mental state and their criminal tendencies. Think Minority Report meets Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. It makes plenty of allusions to the works that it draws its inspiration from, from Plato to Shakespeare to Joseph Conrad and more. The series takes a look at what it means to be a human, how we should interact with a heavily digital society, and what relationship law and ethics should have.
Psycho-Pass 2, which aired in 2014, is basically Psycho-Pass devoid of everything that made it great. It lack's Urobuchi's involvement, which probably should have been the first red flag. But that didn't necessarily mean it would have been bad. Maybe it could have had a solid storyline and good characters. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, many of the best characters from the first season were dead or indisposed and most the other established characters had to be left alone so that they could be used in the then-upcoming movie (which Gen Urobuchi was involved with). So the story had to be carried by the new cast members. Which were, uh...pretty awful.
Without going into too much detail since it involves spoilers for the first season, most of the cast was well-established and had at least some purpose in the story. I've always thought that characters were Urobuchi's strongest points. He doesn't write easily-identifiable and fun caricatures like you see in lots of anime. His characters have some subtlety and nuance to them, and viewers have to work a bit harder to understand them, but can enjoy them more fully if they put in that effort. The characters in PP2? They pretty much exist to drive the plot (which is...not great) or fill out the cast.
Of course, not all characters are necessarily bad at the beginning. At the beginning, I was still hopefully optimistic. Episode 4 is when I abandoned hope. A bunch of hostages are caught in a situation that causes their crime coefficients to rise to levels indicating that they are about to instigate violent crimes. Dominators, the weapons the police use, are set to stun and contain criminals at a certain level and set to kill at a certain level. It's a safety mechanism that protects the people so that lethal force isn't accidentally used. However, as these citizens all blindly rush out of the building in a panic, their crime coefficients elevated, the police massacre them all. Why is this happening? There's something highly abnormal about this. Have no situations like this ever happened before? One would think that the police have procedures for dealing with hostage situations in which victims might become temporarily stressed. But no, that scene needed to be there, because something needed to make she show feel edgy, since the new writer has confused that for being good.
The edginess continues through the series. One of the major plotlines is a villain in the force attempting to make Akane's psycho-pass darker. Why? What good does that do? Why Akane? There is literally no purpose to the plotline other than "it's dark."
Psycho-Pass 2 feels like a single arc of Psycho-Pass stretched out into 11 episodes. It had the potential to be good, but in order to fill time, it took far too long getting to the point, and when it finally did get to the point, the point turned out to contradict a lot of what had previously been established. In theory, the season boiled down to a variation of the God Paradox, i.e., "if God can do anything, can he create a boulder so heavy that he can't lift it?" In this case, the villain, Kamui, asked "if Sibyl is all-judging, how would it judge itself?"
In attempting to answer this question, Psycho-Pass 2 completely changes what "criminally asymptomatic" means, and gives a convoluted answer to the question in the process. The obvious answer, based on what the first season previously established, would be "it doesn't need to because Sibyl is the embodiment of the law and the law is above judgment." But Psycho-Pass 2 sets up a scenario where Sibyl fails to judge a man whose internal organs are a conglomerate of individuals, similar to how Sibyl itself operates. Let's ignore how absolutely stupid this is for a few moments and focus on how Sibyl reacts. Sibyl says "well, we'll judge each of the individuals that are part of you individually, and we'll also judge ourselves individually and eliminate the brains that are raising our crime coefficients." Except that shouldn't happen, because the Sibyl System consists of criminally asymptomatic brains that can't be judged by the Sibyl System. There should not be brains capable of raising its crime coefficient. But of course that shouldn't be surprising, since the writers of Psycho-Pass 2 seem to have no concept of what "criminally asymptomatic" means, considering that Togane is somehow considered criminally asymptomatic while simultaneously having the highest crime coefficient recorded. This is literally the opposite of what criminally asymptomatic has been established to mean. Criminally asymptomatic people have hues that don't match their actions. A murderer like season 1's Makishima is criminally asymptomatic because he has a clear psycho-pass, and I suppose a good person who somehow has a dark psycho-pass would also theoretically be criminally asymptomatic. But having a high crime coefficient is something you would expect from a character who killed puppies as a child. That's not hyperbole, by the way. There is a scene where we literally see Togane murdering puppies as a child. I mean, seriously? Is there a more heavy-handed yet also generic way to establish that he's evil?
Let's come back to our villain, Kamui: he was the only survivor of a plane crash as a child who was saved by surgery that put the organs of the other 184 students who did not survive the plane crash into his body. Let's ignore things like compatibility of blood types and just assume that this somehow works. The result is that he cannot be detected by the Sibyl System because...he's not one person or something. Also, the season is set up around this idea of judging a collective. A collective of brains is wholly different from a collective of organs. A collective of organs should not affect anything the show tries to portray it as affecting. People who have heart or kidney transplants do not undergo random personality changes because they have other people's organs in them. There's probably research to back this up, but I don't need it because it should be obvious to pretty much everyone that this very concept of this happening is absolutely fucking stupid.
So let's recap what exactly we've established with Psycho-Pass 2:
-It focuses more on being dark and edgy than making sense
-It contradicts things that have been previously established in the series
-It's built on a premise that is not only fallacious, but makes no logical sense, either.
There are plenty of other small things I could go into, but those three points alone are enough to condemn the show. Psycho-Pass was an incredibly thoughtful show that, despite sci-fi elements not necessarily grounded in reality, at least stayed consistent. Psycho-Pass 2 is basically Psycho-Pass devoid of everything that made Psycho-Pass good. Does that make Psycho-Pass 2 bad? I honestly can't tell, because I cannot divorce it from Psycho-Pass, and relative to Psycho-Pass, it's bad. But hey, at least Urobuchi's still involved in the movie! Hopefully it doesn't suck when it's finally released here.
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