The Cracked Thread

I always found Krypton kind of weird. I mean, here is this massively advanced civilization capable of FTL travel in a universe with a ton of habitable planets...and they only live on one planet? Why? The destruction of Krypton should not have rendered them almost extinct if only because there should be something else somewhere. The comics tend to come up with weird ways for other Kryptonians to survive when just saying, hey, there's a colony over there that's doing okay would be perfectly fine.

Hell, the fact that Kryptonians and humans look identical could be used to explain why Kryptonians knew where Earth was.

Parallel evolution? Ancient space travelers seeding planets with identical DNA? Heck, the mere fact that Superman, in some continuities, can interbreed with humans indicates that something very weird is going on in the DCU.

And that's why I think the "ancient abandoned Kryptonian space colony as the Fortress of Solitude" thing is such an elegant explanation. And then this Cracked article comes along and is all "Waaah giving a concise and plausible explanation for things is exactly the same as being dark and gritty waaaah!"

Also, I think Supergirl was from Earth's sister planet in the DCAU... but the sister planet was hit by debris from Krypton and wiped out, too. Does that count?

edited 3rd Mar '15 5:58:02 PM by spashthebandragon

I actually did come up with something that would explain the similarity between Krytonians and humans while also introducing a big villain, but I'm not likely to be able to do anything with it.

Is it Brainiac?

Yes, sort of. Braniac would only be pretending to be Kryptonian in this version.

http://www.cracked.com/article_22126_4-important-things-nobody-tells-you-about-miscarriages.html

'Sigh' I whine and bitch about how dumb Cracked has become and then they put out something this well put together and important and it gets really hard to hate them. But in all seriousness it's honestly a pretty good look at how something like this can affect a woman, and of all articles I'd advise you to read the comments and see the other readers sharing their experience.

http://www.cracked.com/article_22142_5-badass-facts-about-women-that-history-books-leave-out.html

Good article, but they changed the title to '5 Discoveries that prove Modern men are Sexist.', because who needs accuracy or honesty when you can have outrage clicks?

Ah clickbait where would Cracked title guy be without?

I love these factual historical articles.

edited 5th Mar '15 9:11:30 AM by phantom1

What makes that title even stupider is that it has nothing to do with the article. At all. It's an article about challenging our perceptions of ancient women, not "here is why all men are always all the time literally without exception misogynistic pigs".

Basically they took an article about women and made it about men.

HMMMM.

edited 5th Mar '15 2:02:28 PM by Midna

A better term would have been things that prove we are androcentric in our historical analyses.

Androcentric? But that's not a clickbait word! It has more than two syllables!

Ah-ha! But "misogyny" has four syllables as well! What, friend, is your point?

http://www.cracked.com/article_22182_5-secret-feminist-messages-hidden-in-portal-franchise.html

Article itself isn't that horrible aside from the fact that they apparently see 'all men are awful' as a feminist message. It's a little reachy but enough time in a literature class and you'll learn that half of this stuff is pretty reachy. However given Cracked's history on social issues I'm having trouble taking any of this in good faith.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-smartphone-annoyances-we-still-have-some-reason/ New title is 6 things smartphones should be able to do, once again meaning that the article itself now makes no sense. I went in expecting Bucholzian madness but no it's a normal article about dumb smartphone problems. I liked how it took a few self depreciating cracks at... Cracked over annoying stuff websites do on their mobile versions.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-reason-pyramid-schemes-are-even-worse-than-you-thought/ This one now says, 'The World's fastest growining Industry ( Is Pyramid scheme). So it has even LESS to do with the article than the last one.

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_1360_23-real-insects-more-horrifying-than-any-movie-monster/

This one is the best Auntie Meme one in a while and shows that she's really come a long way.

it's also not one you should reat while eating.

I really need to get around to playing the Portal games at some point. I keep hearing about all this deep symbolism and whatever, and all I'm thinking is, "A puzzle game where you shoot portals at things? That sounds awesome!"

Ok, I just reach the portal article and I have a few issues, the first point while good it dosent really hold to much for me, I mean yeah the protagonist is a woman and....what? of course it what to do more with silent protagonist, is not really my trope

The second one will be how the game is FULL of chararter when provide just some example, and the picutre there seen more with and AI that to control her...considering she flood the place with neurotoxics...

But what is really bad is the point #3, since it devolp into a loki-level of apologetic with Glados(again, the psychotic mass murder) and miss the flaw of jhonson: that he is so much deep into SCIENCE! that he lost every type of moral, that is why he said that, he consider caroline a brilliant mind who may complain a lot, the whole flaw in aperture science and wheatly is that they are stupid enought to try something and dont think in what would happen

and the last point is just awfull, it reach full WMG with a feminist perspective, even more with the "moon dust is femine" just...aghhh

The Portal article is hardly the first time someone's tried to turn the series into an article on feminism or whatever cause they prefer. I suppose it comes down to intention versus delivery; whether Valve meant to have the games send those messages, a lot of people believe that they do, and that's what matters in our society.

Frankly, I find all the searching for hidden messages a little boring. Portal and Portal 2 are freakishly hilarious and fun games that also happen to be quite progressive in gender themes. That's really as far as this needs to go.

Sometimes a game is just a game. No messages. No politics.

Just. A. Game.

If anything, Portal is a message to the video game industry that you can have a successful franchise without a macho, male protagonist.

Hahaha, man. One of the analyses in that Portal article was that Cave Johnson was poisoned by moon dust, the moon is associated with femininity, therefore it's an allegory for women destroying the patriarchy. Come on.

The only 'message' from the Portal series is that Citrus of Mass Destruction is not yet a viable option for any military.

That depends on the pantheon you're using. For example: Greek or Roman goes female, while Japanese or Hindu uses male.

edited 7th Mar '15 2:54:38 PM by ScarletCajun

I'm on the side that has to wonder if that Portal article was some kind of off-beat satire. Because it starts with the most legitimate point/argument, but then slowly descends until it ends with reaches I've never seen before.

I mean, there's ways to take a feminist approach to Portal, but this is just not the way to go.

I've only played Portal 2, but yes, it is very awesome. And funny.

It absolutely is.

It's because she's a voiceless first-person avatar, a role typically reserved for a white male - commonly considered among film produces and video game developers to be the Default State of a person. If you need someone to be a blank slate, you typically get a white man. Female protagonists typically only come about when the writer is trying to make the plot about her femininity, while minority protagonists only come about when the writer is trying to make the plot about racial issues; to have a character where race and gender is completely irrelevant to the role and yet the developers chose to make that character an Asian female for literally no reason at all is a fantastic step away from the idea of the White Male Default.

It's also a step away from the Token Strong Female, in which writers have attempted to throw women a bone while still having their cake by including a token Tough Women - often a Faux Action Girl - in everything; we've all seen this character a thousand times before. She's tough, she's gritty, she takes no shit from anyone, she gets one or two sequences where she completely shows up the men to illustrate how pro-girl and female-friendly she is, and then she gets beat up, killed, kidnapped, or just plain acquiesces to the main character's superiority in order to put the spotlight back on the white male protagonist.

A few moments of Michelle Rodriguez in an otherwise male power fantasy isn't what feminists have been pushing for. What we want is a fair sampling of protagonists, and that includes the ones otherwise deemed empty or shallow characters and power fantasies; female Master Chiefs and female Links and female Silent Hill protagonists and such. Chell helps fulfill that by giving women - and Asians, for that matter - an everyman character that they can feel truly represents them, rather than feeling like they're just borrowing one from the boys.

And none of that changes the fact that these characters abuse women. Sexism isn't a core motivation, it's a casual character trait. It's just something a person has, and rarely motivates anything beyond that person's interactions with the opposite sex. Cave Johnson didn't dedicate his life to abusing Caroline, but he still forced an invasive, personal procedure on her against her will because he didn't respect her right to decide her own fate and felt he knew better than her - as many sexist men do with the women in their lives. That metaphorical rape is only one of Cave Johnson's offenses against humanity does not disprove his sexism; it just proves it's merely a small part of a larger horror of a man.

Additionally, there is nothing "apologism" in saying that G La DOS is a victim perpetuating a cycle of abuse, because that is exactly what she is. It was already hinted at in her original design being fashioned after a woman in bondage, and Portal 2 went ahead and made that explicit.

Have you seriously never encountered the idea of the sun's masculinity and the moon's femininity? It's pretty popular in Grecoroman mythos, in modern paganism, and in modern storytelling.

As noted, there are many cultures that attribute a masculine quality to the moon. If anything, the sun's masculinity is more determinant than the moon's femininity.