No, it’s not reading the damn lyrics.
I’d not heard that before but some of the (four-headed) angelic beings have the head of an ox so it’s not completely out there.
The seraphim were likely even scarier: the word can mean both ‘burning’ and ‘serpent.’ So yeah, flying snakes/dragons on fire.
Right, and modern film/TV interpretations do to a degree suffer from a loss of the basis some passages had satirizing the moralistic, didactic nature of Victorian children’s literature – such as the in-book parodies of poems like “You Are Old, Father William”; or the passage:
It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do THAT in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they WOULD not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger VERY deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
Which ISTM brings in another factor in these sorts of misunderstandings: the assumption that what’s the original reference is such common knowledge it’ll come to mind right away.
Since this seems like it was obliquely aimed at me:
I get that a lot of people know about Harley Quinn in vague terms but don’t have the deep geek knowledge that I do, and I wouldn’t expect them to. I wouldn’t think there was anything at all odd about someone knowing Harley Quinn is an acrobatic bad grrl anti-hero and have no idea of her backstory as a disgraced psychiatrist.
It was just people being aware of the fact of Harley and Joker’s relationship without being aware of the nature of the relationship that struck me as odd. I accept that it’s true. But, it just strikes me as odd that the exact level of familiarity with the characters that would lead to that misunderstanding is widespread.
I remember at the time of release on twitter and podcasts a lot of left-leaning people took umbrage at Wonder Woman 2017 for the plot twist that the British politician who most wanted peace in WW1 was actually the big bad in disguise who actually wanted to extend the war and claimed that Wonder Woman was “Pro-War” or “Anti-Pacifism” for that message, completely ignoring the fact the bad guys plan was for the British to THINK there was actually peace only for the “Germans” to attack the peace ceremony in London with chemical weapons, causing massive causalities and thereby enraging the British populace and extended the war for longer
Sort of? Again, spoilers just in case:
IIRC, immediately after the blast, which was explicitly supposed to re-set the timeline so they never crashed on the Island, we see Sawyer on a plane - but it’s not the same flight, and it’s not really the same Sawyer. He’s now a cop on the anti-fraud squad chasing grifters instead of being a grifter. Which pretty clearly has to be a new timeline created by the blast.
After that, we see what appear to be alternating scenes from parallel timelines. One has the characters all back in the present and still on the Island because the re-set didn’t work from their perspective. The other has a timeline that seems to have diverged well before the doomed flight, with some characters’ lives having been radically different apparently since the “time” of the explosion.
It’s only at the very end that we find out that the non-reset timeline is the “real” timeline and that all really happened, but the “flash-sideways” timeline which appeared to be a re-set was actually some sort of Purgatory and none of that “really” happened - it was all a sort of mutual fantasy created by the characters after they died so they could have a shared afterlife (a shared afterlife where they didn’t know each other - the whole thing never made much sense to me).
I just have to comment on this, since my username comes from joining this forum in order to stop lurking and be able to comment on the last season of Lost while it was happening. All through the last season my wife kept saying “the writers don’t have a clue where they’re going” but I kept the faith. Until the stupid, stupid ending.
Actually, the last season was a big “F U” from the writers to the viewers. The writers swore that the characters weren’t in Purgatory. They also said that the explanation for the island’s powers and all the weird shit would not be magic, but would be more science-fiction based.
Then they explain the island’s powers through some folderol about Jakob, his brother, their mother, who are all apparently immortal for some reason, and some magical golden creamy center the island contains that they tap into to get magical things to happen. And they sneak a version of Purgatory into the end as well.
Well, F U right back, Carlton, Lindelof, Cuse, et al!
In my own experience, the “stuff everyone seems to misunderstand” about Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland is that it’s supposed to be funny. I’ve seen many people fail to “get” the Alice books because they come to them expecting a fantasy adventure story or a conventional fairy tale. Whereas IMHO the closest parallel I can think of is the Monty Python movies, where the overall storyline is mostly an excuse to string together a series of comedic scenes. (Although a recently revived thread about Monty Python and the Holy Grail makes me wonder how many people understand what those are, either.
“Won’t Get Fooled Again” by The Who is not a pro-revolution song, it’s an anti-revolution song.
The refrain is the author saying to the revolutionaries “Good for you. Let’s change things!”, then praying that change actually happens.
Verses are
- OK, I’m fighting for change.
- We needed change; we fought, but it doesn’t look different yet.
bridge: Let’s face it, it isn’t going to change. - It didn’t change.
Meet the new boss, just the same as the old boss.
I think it’s more like "Sees a picture of Joker & Harley on top of a pile of money and posts it to their social media with ‘LOL Relationship Goals!!!’ " because they think it’s a neat/funny/cool picture. Their familiarity with the characters is about as deep as my familiarity with My Little Pony or Adventure Time – I can recognize what they are and what show they come from and am vaguely familiar with the premise of the show but that’s about where it ends. I’m sure I could post something related to one of those shows and have better informed people explain how such-and-such is really a tragic story and I’m totally misreading what the scene represents
Absolutely.
I like the interpretation that seraphim are meant to be a representation of lightning. That seems to fit in pretty well with what we know about them . (FWIW, I think that Chines dragons are also personifications of lightning. It explains an awful lot about them.)
That does make sense. I think part of it is I’m just too old to really understand meme culture, or for it to even occur to me in a lot of cases. I’m thinking, “How do they even know who Harley Quinn is, and know she’s the Joker’s girlfriend, but somehow not know that he’s horrifically abusive? What depictions are they seeing that show Harley and Joker in a relationship that don’t center its abusive nature?” And the answer is: they’ve seen a meme.
All of you can now get off my lawn.
That’s from the book of Ezekiel, where the cherubim are described this way
It took me a while to realize that these four creatures are the origin of the four symbols of the Evangelists – Mark was a winged lion, Matthew a winged man (often said to be an angel, for obvious reasons), Luke a winged ox, and John a winged eagle (well, eagles already have wings). The figures are winged because the cherubim of Ezekiel flew in the sky. They make a re-appearance in book of Revelation, but with more wings this time
Honestly, I think the answer might just as likely be, “They recognize that dynamic from their personal lives, and are still invested in excusing or minimizing it.” There are a lot of people who are in relationships with people who ping-pong between abuse and dramatic declarations of love and devotion for their victim. It’s not really a stretch to imagine these people responding positively to the Joker demolishing a city block in some dramatic gesture to prove that he “really loves” Harley, and ignoring the part where he throws her out of a helicopter, in pretty much the same way they focus on the dramatic gestures and ignore the helicopters in their own relationships.
Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven
I saw it in the theatre and found the ending shootout leaving my feeling saddened for Munny that he got dragged back into having to kill again after being so morally conflicted and haunted about it in his later years.
I think the message was completely missed by the crowd I was with since they all seemed to cheer when the shooting started and considered it some type of heroic comeback for Munny where the goodguy beat the badguys.
The meaning I took from Unforgiven was that there were no good guys. One of my favorite westerns.
It’s a little strange, but what’s really weird is that up until 2008 both DC and Marvel had a character named Captain Marvel. Why didn’t DC sue Marvel?
It’s a long story, but ultimately DC’s Captain Marvel predated Marvel’s.
Fawcett Comics created Captain Marvel in the 40s and it was the most popular comic book hero of the time. DC sued, saying Captain Marvel infringed on Superman. The trial dragged on and Fawcett decided to stop publishing comics and settled, but they kept the trademark. They let it lapse (pure neglect). Marvel noticed and trademarked the name for the comic book, which had various incarnations over the years.
DC decided to bring back the original Captain Marvel, but couldn’t use the name as the name of the comic, so they settled on Shazam. But Marvel’s trademark only applied to the title, so DC could still use “Captain Marvel” as the name of the character (I believe they licensed/bought it from Fawcett).
A few years ago, they gave up and just called the character “Shazam.”
So DC didn’t sue Marvel because Marvel owned the trademark. Marvel could sue DC (and did) to keep the name from the cover of the comic, but they didn’t own the trademark on the character name, and Marvel’s versions had nothing to do with the Big Red Cheese.
The lesson of this thread seems to be, if you are going to parody or satirize something, you better be over-the-top obvious about it, or else Poe’s Law will bite hard.
I’ve had it with these flaming snakes on this flaming plane!