Tuesday Night Television.
Nov. 26th, 2002 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosA discussion of Smallville, wherein I use too many exclamation marks and get very pissy. Buffy will follow in a bit.
Smallville: an hour of my life I would just as soon have back, except for the moments when I yelled at the tv. No, actually, including those as well. Caves. In Kansas. Riiiiiiight.
The SV folks are going for more XF stuff here: The Bible? In Navajo? Er, I mean, the meteor shower? In "Native American?" And the myths have real connections to aliens? Holy rusted metal, Batman!
Plus: why look, it's "Native American music" and "Native American myth" and "Native American people!" As we all know, everyone in North America was exactly the same. Same myths, same language. Except those people who build pyramids in Mexico, which probably doesn't really count as North American anyway. Let's ignore the pyramids in the Mississippi Valley. I wanted to slap everyone this episode for sins related to anth and arch.
Kyla. I mean, my god. Kyla? We can start there. Exotic Mary Sue. Sekrit special powers. Dying horribly at the end. I bet her other names were Passionflower Ravenwing. She had her very own "Native American jewelry." And hey, look, she got to change into a wolf! Just like the shamanic journey that has interesting cross-cultural stuff going on! Oh, wait, except without the shamanic journey part. And the spirit worlds part. In fact, the Kryptonite is what causes the shapeshifting-into-an-animal part. It has no ritual significance. It's just mutation. And everyone can do it. Oy. And why does everyone always pick wolves?
And there are 100 year old inscriptions! Wow, a whole hundred years! Why, those ... post-date the Battle of Wounded Knee! And the reservation system! And folks being kicked out of the good agricultural land like Smallville and kids being sent to Indian Schools! So the existence of those is really, really impressive.
And the wolf left perfect Canis lupus toothmarks on the foreman's bones! Wowzers! I mean, that's really incredibly, because said wolf didn't bite that hard, and you really need to worry at the muscle to mark the bone. Nobody wants to bite a bone if there's flesh available. Hurts your teeth. And then to leave marks that were exactly wolf and couldn't be anything else? Again, really impressive. They must have some fucking fabulous ESP anthropologist-coroner in Smallville to see that. Especially since people who are fucking trained in IDing bone say "Canid" (dog family) and have done with it. Maybe "large Canid." Dogs all have similar teeth; all that differs, pretty much, is size, and there are feral and domestic dogs as big as that wolf.
Ooooooh, and then we had to go and make up "Native American myths" to legitimize Superman. And give him a "destiny." Because destiny is way sexier than agency and choosing to be good and making, y'know, choices. So this way, we can have Mystical Native American stuff keyed to Superman's key. Because the Mystical Native Americans Have a Prophecy. Us poor, cultureless white folks would never have a prophecy, oh no. We don't get prophecies (except the Bible and Nostradamus and Mother Shipman and...) Only those wonderfully exotic "Native Americans" get the prophecies and the myths. Because, see, they're the only ones who would believe the alien-dude. We'd be too smart for that. And use Science.
And Martha needs to take a class or workshop on untrenching white liberalism, methinks. "I understand your problems but I know how to solve them better than you do, and why should you have any agency?"
Plus the ultimate sin: building an office building without doing a complete environmental report, which, by federal law (NEPA, I think) is required to include archaeological information. It's really pretty damn hard to miss a bunch of caves that size. Even if we presume a NEPA-free world, um, the builders would really prefer not to build on caves. They make sinkholes and unstable foundation. If Clark can fall through the caves, so can heavier things. Like cars. And buildings. And then to get a solid grounding on bedrock, you have to flood them with concrete, which is expensive. And the bigger the cave system, the more expensive, and ... why not just move the building to some of the under-utilized land around it? Oh, right. Sucky plot reasoning.
To paraphrase Franklin: "And then I shot them, your honor."
Oh, and: "it's different when a girl likes you back." Wuss. Hasn't stopped Lex from longing. And, oh, look, Chloe! Grrr.
Smallville: an hour of my life I would just as soon have back, except for the moments when I yelled at the tv. No, actually, including those as well. Caves. In Kansas. Riiiiiiight.
The SV folks are going for more XF stuff here: The Bible? In Navajo? Er, I mean, the meteor shower? In "Native American?" And the myths have real connections to aliens? Holy rusted metal, Batman!
Plus: why look, it's "Native American music" and "Native American myth" and "Native American people!" As we all know, everyone in North America was exactly the same. Same myths, same language. Except those people who build pyramids in Mexico, which probably doesn't really count as North American anyway. Let's ignore the pyramids in the Mississippi Valley. I wanted to slap everyone this episode for sins related to anth and arch.
Kyla. I mean, my god. Kyla? We can start there. Exotic Mary Sue. Sekrit special powers. Dying horribly at the end. I bet her other names were Passionflower Ravenwing. She had her very own "Native American jewelry." And hey, look, she got to change into a wolf! Just like the shamanic journey that has interesting cross-cultural stuff going on! Oh, wait, except without the shamanic journey part. And the spirit worlds part. In fact, the Kryptonite is what causes the shapeshifting-into-an-animal part. It has no ritual significance. It's just mutation. And everyone can do it. Oy. And why does everyone always pick wolves?
And there are 100 year old inscriptions! Wow, a whole hundred years! Why, those ... post-date the Battle of Wounded Knee! And the reservation system! And folks being kicked out of the good agricultural land like Smallville and kids being sent to Indian Schools! So the existence of those is really, really impressive.
And the wolf left perfect Canis lupus toothmarks on the foreman's bones! Wowzers! I mean, that's really incredibly, because said wolf didn't bite that hard, and you really need to worry at the muscle to mark the bone. Nobody wants to bite a bone if there's flesh available. Hurts your teeth. And then to leave marks that were exactly wolf and couldn't be anything else? Again, really impressive. They must have some fucking fabulous ESP anthropologist-coroner in Smallville to see that. Especially since people who are fucking trained in IDing bone say "Canid" (dog family) and have done with it. Maybe "large Canid." Dogs all have similar teeth; all that differs, pretty much, is size, and there are feral and domestic dogs as big as that wolf.
Ooooooh, and then we had to go and make up "Native American myths" to legitimize Superman. And give him a "destiny." Because destiny is way sexier than agency and choosing to be good and making, y'know, choices. So this way, we can have Mystical Native American stuff keyed to Superman's key. Because the Mystical Native Americans Have a Prophecy. Us poor, cultureless white folks would never have a prophecy, oh no. We don't get prophecies (except the Bible and Nostradamus and Mother Shipman and...) Only those wonderfully exotic "Native Americans" get the prophecies and the myths. Because, see, they're the only ones who would believe the alien-dude. We'd be too smart for that. And use Science.
And Martha needs to take a class or workshop on untrenching white liberalism, methinks. "I understand your problems but I know how to solve them better than you do, and why should you have any agency?"
Plus the ultimate sin: building an office building without doing a complete environmental report, which, by federal law (NEPA, I think) is required to include archaeological information. It's really pretty damn hard to miss a bunch of caves that size. Even if we presume a NEPA-free world, um, the builders would really prefer not to build on caves. They make sinkholes and unstable foundation. If Clark can fall through the caves, so can heavier things. Like cars. And buildings. And then to get a solid grounding on bedrock, you have to flood them with concrete, which is expensive. And the bigger the cave system, the more expensive, and ... why not just move the building to some of the under-utilized land around it? Oh, right. Sucky plot reasoning.
To paraphrase Franklin: "And then I shot them, your honor."
Oh, and: "it's different when a girl likes you back." Wuss. Hasn't stopped Lex from longing. And, oh, look, Chloe! Grrr.
