Perverts and Pictures in the Harry Potter Universe

While making out with my girlfriend in a room filled with family pictures, I made the comment about how in the world of Harry Potter, parents most likely do not keep any family photos in their bedroom. She understood what I was saying. When pictures are in a sense a copy of the person's soul, that can interact with you as well as display the full range of emotion, you're gonna be cautious as to what pictures you have in areas where you get intimate or undressed. Family photos in the bedroom, any bedroom really are just not going to be a regular thing and could actually serve as a sign of questionable perversions. Of course if you're into voyeurism, there would be an interesting kink to pictures of yourself by the bedside.

This whole idea takes us to some interesting places when it comes to decorating one's house. You would actually do an interview process before buying a piece of art, in order to make sure those in the art are of the proper state of mind for the room you intend to display them in.

I could see a bachelor looking for paintings of women who are flirtatious, with no issues about nudity for his bedroom or office. A planned out bachelor pad would most likely have strategically placed pictures. You could have a live band always available.

Adult magazines would be a whole different thing. There wouldn't be the need for as many pictures, just different angles and costumes. You could actually direct the models and create your own story with them. The models could also play the roll of censor, covering themselves up and refusing to put on a show for underage boys. Would make muggle magazines highly desirable in the magical world for teenage boys.

Then we would almost have to break away from the stereotype of the teenage girl covering her walls with posters of her crushes. In the Harry Potter universe this would be highly problematic.  Twenty-something men watching young girls in various states of dress, as they explore their bodies or as they sleep. High creep factor there. And reading your teen magazines in bed or the bath presents the same problem. In fact any magical magazines or newspapers present such a situation, as bringing them into the restroom with you, has all manner of issues.

In a world where your pictures are living, thinking, feeling beings, there should be all manner of moral considerations for that society on how you treat them. The possibilities for perversions would seem limitless in that world. Someone who was into real kinky stuff would most likely find new ways to explore those kinks. And privacy would be noticeably harder to control when you are literally being watched wherever you go.

Just one more twisted area of the Harry Potter universe that was clearly there, but never explored.

So That is Star Trek Discovery...

Watched the pilot episode of Star Trek Discovery last night and was rather unimpressed, despite everyone else seeming to claim it to be great television. I'm not a die hard Trekkie, but I generally enjoy Trek. Yet I did not find anything enjoyable about Discovery.

I'm going to go through my thought process as I watched the show.

First scene we got the Klingons that are not really Klingons. They look nothing at all like Klingons, none of the tech feels like Klingon tech and while I am fairly sure their were speaking Klingon (I don't know the language) they spoke it far softer than every other time we've heard Klingon, even when humans have spoken it, so it didn't sound like Klingon. Everything about these creatures felt like a whole new species. Even the switch from the ST:TOS Klingons to what they became in the movies and into the future series felt more like they could be the same species, as they had a similar feel to them. These new branch of the species has nothing to give that similar feel. It is like saying that cats and lizards are the same species because they walk on four legs. You wouldn't believe such a claim.

Maybe the show will give a working explanation for this (I had already come up with one concerning this being a religious off branch that got caught up in a lot of inbreeding) , but I'm not that interested in watching any more to find out. I also doubt the reasoning will be believable.

If they want to use Klingons, then use Klingons.  If instead they wanted a new species, then go with a new species. It really is that simple.

Next scene we find ourselves watching Rey and friend in a cut scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. A boring cut scene where nothing interesting is happening, that turns out to actually be a scene stolen from Star Trek: Into Darkness, with  none of the humor or excitement, including having the starship enter a planet's atmosphere.

So already they have done nothing that has felt original, nothing that has drawn me in. The characters have been boring, the action has been boring and I am ready to turn it off. At this point the show had nothing to offer. Any other show that had such a start without the Star Trek name would most likely lose all its viewers.

And now they are repairing a satellite...

After a drawn out exploration scene we get a five second fight followed by a commercial break and an awkward time jump.

Oh, our main character was raised by Vulcans, with a close relationship to Spock's father. Some character development, which no other character gets at all in the least. Of course Vulcans are as illogical as ever by expecting humans to not have emotions, as if humans would not act like humans for some reason. This has always been one great flaw with any Vulcan. If they were as great as they wish to believe themselves to be, they would understand the usefulness of emotions. It is one aspect of Trek that was over used and old, which needs to be worked on for once, instead of reused.

Then we start getting the awkward camera angles and the lens flare that did not work in the Abram's movies and does not work here. At times it feel as if they took all the parts of the Abram's movies that did not work, and used them, while ignoring the aspects of those movies that made them enjoyable.

Finally we get to the first real conflict in the episode (with five minutes left) as our main character knows better than her captain, who refuses to listen because of Star Fleet regulations. This is followed by our main character assaulting her commanding officer and then attempting mutiny. So by any logic at all, our main character should be court-martialed in the next episode. We all know that won't happen, as this has been done so many time before in Trek and the character never faces real consequences and even gets promoted.

The first episode then ends with the Klingons getting reinforcements. It also ended with me saying 'that's it?' I do not really care about any of the characters, as most served as nothing more than background for out man character who I have no desire to follow.

Now I know there is a part two available online, but I'm not interested in checking it out. I doubt it will fix the problems I have with it.

Over all I saw nothing original in it. The story was just not there. No real drama or conflict to be found. No humor. I don't care about any of the characters, especially the main character, as none of them are interesting. I really believe that if not for the Star Trek link, this show would not be getting so much praise.

I felt like I had seen all of this before and done better.

In the end this is just CBS trying to get it streaming service started by using an established franchise. We'll see how that works out for them.

Piss Poor Lock-Ups

Been watching Super-Girl this week (just glad that for once they actually got the whole super-person character right for once) and have been enjoying it, thankful that they are avoiding a great deal of the laws that have always made Super-Man an uninteresting character. However, there was one great flaw in the series that is a common flaw in general fiction.

So many sci-fi/fantasy prisons just do not work and are so poorly conceived, they become insulting.

In Super-Girl, the Kryptonians are so enlightened that have do not have the death penalty. Instead they have a far worse, less humane way to deal with unwanted individuals. They put the criminals in a place called Fort Rozz, which is in the Phantom Zone.  Time does not pass in the Phantom Zone. And we are given the impression that all trips to Fort Rozz are life sentences  with no hope of parole. This basically means the prisoners are held in a place where they are outside of time, not aging, forever. No surprise at all that when the prisoners finally get free, they are pissed off and wanting revenge. Nothing about the Fort Rozz concept works. The dangerous criminals get to stay young, and spend their lives being tortured by captivity on a truly inhumane level. There is nothing enlightening about that concept.

Same goes for the Phantom Zone in the 80s Super-man movie. General Zod and his crew were trapped in a real confined space and shot into the Phantom Zone, which they escape from and were even more dangerous than before, in no small part due to their anger over being treated so inhumanly.

There is no doubt that death would be far more humane than being imprisoned in the Phantom Zone.

Yet this idea of being enlightened and not having the Death Penalty pops up a lot and creates stupid form of imprisonment. One we see often is the idea of suspended animation.  The perfect example of this is the movie Demolition Man. Both our hero and villain are frozen as their punishment (will ignore the fact that the hero was frozen over testimony from the villain and nothing more.) Once unfrozen neither of them have experienced time. The villain basically got a long nap for being a mass murderer, and is fully rested when awoken. When the punishment deprives the criminal of any sense of being punished, it really just goes against the whole purpose of a punishment. There is no chance at all of rehabilitation. Being forced to take a nap will not give the bad guy any time to reflect on his/her actions. Any time-based sentence in suspended animation is really just a waste of time, and any life sentence to such is just silly.

Then we have Azkaban. No matter how much you might enjoy the world of Harry Potter, any thinking person has to admit it has a good deal of poorly thought-out concepts, and it is fair to say that Azkaban is at the top of that list. Azkaban is a truly horrible place where people are sent to be tortured in a manner that is beyond inhumane. This is from the Harry Potter Wiki: "Most of the prisoners inside its walls died of despair, having lost the will to live. This is due to the presence of Dementor guards on the island. Dementors drain people of all happiness and leave them with their worst memories, long-term exposure can also lead to insanity." To make this all the more deranged, we know that individuals are sent there for just being suspected of committing crimes. You hope there are other less dramatic prisons in that world for those found guilty of minor crimes, but we never get the sense of that. The logic of sending criminals to a place that will either kill them from sever mental torture or drive them dangerously mad just does not work on any level in any manner of an even mildly humane society. With that kind of thinking running the magical world, it should be highly surprising that they are not producing Voldemorts every day.

I am not sure where the idea of such poorly conceived prison concepts come from. Those concepts are a weakness in so many fictional worlds and could easily be avoided with a little thought. In all the examples I have given here, death would be a truly more humane choice, so the claim of being enlightened falls flat in all these cases.

At The Edge of Disappointment

A few years ago Marvel comics did a huge Spider-man event called Spiderverse. As a huge fan of Spider-Man I was excited for it and found it very enjoyable, loving all the ideas of alternate versions of Spider-man as well as making use of all the versions we had seen before in unique, creative ways. I wrote a few posts on it at the time.

As a follow up event, Marvel is right now doing Venomverse, which was being promoted to look a lot like Spiderverse. I started regularly reading and collecting Spider-Man right before Venom was introduced, so I have been there since the beginning with him. And while there were aspects I liked of the character, it took them a while to give him real growth, most of the time he was at his best when he was breaking away from the crazed killer mentality, fighting with his duel nature. In recent years they did some drastic changes with the character, curing the alien symbiote of its madness, creating a heroic version of the character called Venom Space Knight, with a real purpose for once.

With no explanation given, Marvel comics took Venom back to his original character on just about all levels, seeming to ignore the past decade of its history.

With the Spiderverse event, it all started with the Edge of Spiderverse, where we got to see various takes of Spider-man, each was unique and different, with Spider-Gwen (Where Gwen Stacy ended up getting bit instead of Peter Parker) taking off as and receiving her own regular comic. The regular Spider-Man comics also had extra stories introducing other new concepts, each one being its own character with a new take on Spider-Man (A young Aunt May as the Steam Punk Spider-man). And then they all came together with their uniqueness and each having their own place in the story. As some o the version were darker takes on the character, that created conflict and opened up the story to possibilities.

With Venomverse they did an Edge of Venomverse. With EoV they took two version of Wolverine, two versions of Deadpool and Ghost Rider and gave them an alien symbiote. So you now have already dark characters each becoming more like the generic Venom, with the basic madness. They all felt to me like almost the same character. All of them were Venom, just now with extra super powers. There really was nothing at all inspiring or interesting it these new versions of the character. Four of those stories ended with a Venom Captain America recruiting the new Venoms to fight a war.

Everything about Venomverse already comes off as lacking in all the areas that matter. I really have  no desire to read a story where they have half a dozen versions of the same character, at its least interesting, teaming up for some reason that I'm not sure I care about due to having no sympathy or interest in the characters. After reading Edge of Venomverse, I really don't care about the characters or their stories. I am a little beyond the sixth grade mentality that these characters seem to be trying to appeal to.

While the initial concept intrigued me and I had so hoped they would follow what worked with Spiderverse, while making it into its own story (Which was possible). It looks like I will be skipping this event and invest my efforts elsewhere.