shoot, i lost a post.
@tobias
See what you seem to be doing here is taking some vague lines from Karli assuming that they did something completely impossible, and then criticising it for doing the impossible thing you assumed it did. Instead of thinking 'well that's impossible so maybe I'm not understanding it or it's not saying that'.
Did you ever response to this post
? Because (as I see it) the show isn't about blipped vs unblipped as massive racial groups. It's about a small subsection of unblipped.
It doesn't require the blipped to be in power for the government to be giving the blipped favourable treatment.
Edited by dcutter2 on Jul 12th 2022 at 4:17:39 PM
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I'm doing no such thing. We don't see birds unblipped. We get a very weird vague scene where Scott guesses the unsnapped worked because he sees birds.
The filmmakers could easily have shown plants and animals dusting as well as people. They didn't.
edit: How is that not normal speech? People talk like that all t he time about elections. Oh the same assholes will be in charge whoever I vote for. It doesn't mean you have literally the same people in government it just means things aren't going to change.
edit2: I'm getting too annoyed with this. (my own fault, not anyone else's) And inadvertently started another argument about something that really bugs me. Obviously no one is going convince each other here. So I'm going to step away from the thread and convo. Reply or not as you like. (and if i do come back remind I said this maybe, thanks) Apologies statements like this often come off dickish and like I'm trying to take the highground. Not my intent. Cheers all.
Edited by dcutter2 on Jul 12th 2022 at 4:25:48 PM
Know what would have cost tens and tens of thousands of dollars in VFX and editing and continuity and bloating two already extremely long movies? Showing literally everything that's dusted.
Know what would have cost literally nothing and in fact filled up time in a show that didn't know what it was doing? A line opposing Karli's statement by literally anyone, at any time. And you miss my point. My point is that it's also normal speech to, well, say what you mean. So what if she is trying to say "the same assholes are in charge." Hyperbole exists, yes. But then what should she be saying if she's actually being literal?
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.Steve’s claim seems to be more along the lines that less human activity means whales have more range, not that there are more whales. People in real life reported the same thing at the start of the pandemic when less boat traffic in Venice resulted in dolphins being seen in the canals.
Karli: “We can’t let the same assholes who were put back in power after The Blip win. The GRC care more about the people who came back than the ones who never left. We got a glimpse of how things could be.”
Personally that line was the start of me not sympathizing with Karli. It felt so disconnected from what actually happened in-story. There's something that rubs me the wrong way about representing it like the rich and elite were the only one who disappeared and lost powers during the Blip only to come back in power, when in truth tons of people from everywhere suffered and friggin' died before coming back. It kinda felt like Karli was tyring to force a black and white rich vs poor narrative on a situation that was more complex.
Thanos was an idiot waxing poetic about Malthusian Economics while having no real understanding of the things he was so violently convinced he was right about. What If? even made fun of this by having T'Challa sit him down and just teach him economics for a while, ending his campaign.
... You know, when you put it that way, that makes this episode of What If? extra funny for me. Especially since I'm a bit frustrated that nobody tried poking holes in Thanos' theory during Infinity War, instead merely answering him on the moral ground that "genocide is bad" (which is true, but come on, he clearly wasn't going to listen).
Yes. They would have to win elections to "sweep back into power". You're looking at a timeframe of several years, not a couple of months.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Yeah. In a long-term sense? Possible. But piggybacking on the mention a few pages back about how the unblipped would be tired and welcome the relatively energetic Blipped back... in what version of Earth where those that seek power and then gain it realistically cede it to... anyone.
If I'm Alice, and spent years pushing Alice for Senate, and am the kind of person to realistically have capitalized on the Blip to become Senator Alice, what are the odds I wouldn't I disenfranchise those that would say "hey, let's vote back in that Blipped Bob"?
Like, I don't doubt that the Snap would've been taxing on everyone and that it would've taken an exceptional amount of work. But personally knowing the behavior of people at the politician level, they wouldn't view the unblipped as people to help so much as potential threats.
If you really want to go into it, how long do you think it would be before the Blipped got voting rights back? Even at the most optimistic, our system simply doesn't have the capability of making sure everyone has the ability to vote as-is. Imagine a scenario where 50% of the voting-eligible population suddenly says "hey, let me vote. Even though I was legally dead last year." That's simply... not possible.
Edited by Larkmarn on Jul 12th 2022 at 2:48:12 PM
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.Ohhh, yeah. Voting rolls would be a nightmare. A lot of people would have been purged in those five years, and depending on the state, trying to re-register to vote can sometimes be a hassle.
Which absolutely is something that would be magnified by racial discrimination. States use trickery like this to restrict voting rights from minorities, and the Blip would make that so much worse. Suburban whites would face a far easier time getting their registrations activated, but if you're a black person who lives in one of those communities that has, like, one election office per 200 miles and you Blipped? You're screwed.
Realistically speaking, in addition to inventing the new marginalized class of Blipped people, the Blip would also have a knock-on effect of amplifying existing hurdles for disenfranchised people.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Jul 12th 2022 at 11:48:00 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
This isn't even fanon or subtext. There were scenes of a black man being unable to get a loan because he was blipped in this show. They acknowledged the logistical nightmare of being gone for five years and just... showing up again.
So the show apparently landing on "well, the Blipped got off too well" is just... weird.
Define "Blip." Because if you mean the Snap, then... probably most. Even the most tinpot governments have something resembling a line of succession. If you mean the Endgame Snap (inexplicably officially also referred to the same term as Thanos' dusting) then I got nothing.
Edited by Larkmarn on Jul 12th 2022 at 4:23:28 AM
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.No, if it was several years, it would have been normalized. You wouldn't have Blipped as a force of politics.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.I genuinely don't know what you're trying to say there, Charles. Care to elaborate?
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.Essentially, the presentation of the show is that the "Blipped take over" is an argument against conservatism. Basically, that the Blipped returned and immediately set out to make everything as much like the Pre-Blipped verse as possible. It's a weak connection but the show is using it as a metaphor for Making America Great Again, Brexit, European Anti-Immigration and other ideas of nostalgia for the past.
Captain America is used as a symbol caught between those two kinds of people with those who want to make Captain America as much like the old guy as possible (John Walker, White Guy American War Hero) and those who view it as a force of progression and challenge to authority.
We see with Isaiah Bradley and Bucky Barnes that in fact the past royally sucked ass and Sam Wilson needs to fight against that Toxic Nostalgia with the power of Truth. The Pre-Blip world can't exist again and was not something to idolize in the first place.
For the sake of the story to work, the Pre-Blip order and presumably Pre-Blipped politicians took over through the power of nostalgia. They assumed power because the Blipped and Blip Survivors looked to the Pre-Blip world with a filter of a better world not traumatized by mass death and chaos. How they did it is anyone's guess but I think it's fine to assume that it was an election year and they swept the polls on promises of a return to normality. Normality as defined by "The Old World"
Even though it was an awful unfair and socially bigoted world (because it was our world).
The show has a Central Theme of toxic nostalgia and restoring the past or preserving it when that past is defined by racial and social heirarchies the Flagsmashers hate.
Am I overthinking this?
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 12th 2022 at 3:21:40 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
I think you are.
Partly because that just feeds into the 'Thanos was right for the wrong reasons' narrative which the show only avoids by having (as far as I recall) literally no one point out that that's what the Flag Smashers are actually arguing for.
But mostly because the show resolutely refuses to address what was actually better about a world where half the population had just been murdered. We get a few suggestions of open borders, which seems transparently to be bullshit given that we know Sokovia as a country was dismembered in this period (unless it was destroyed in the 'few months' since they returned, or the few years before the Snap, though I'd think that might have been mentioned prior) and we see literally everywhere has borders again, a few months after the return. I mean, am I supposed to believe that literally everywhere uniformly returned the Blipped to power and re-established borders in a few months? We all saw how long Brexit took, right? And those shady missions that Faux-Cap went on, were clearly recent given age and press coverage.
But, even if borders had been relaxed and so people could follow work flows, that probably would have been more than cancelled out by the massive industrial/political/demographic/agricultural/economic collapse caused by the death of literally half the population.
But the critical failure (or I guess you could cast it as a success if Karli wasn't so transparently being treated as 'going too far for a noble cause') is that Karli is also engaged in toxic nostalgia, just for the world of a few months ago (which we never see, or really hear described), rather than that of five years ago (and now, right? Because they've somehow won this argument?). You'll also notice that Sam's final argument isn't 'you should have open borders' its 'give in to terrorism,' uh, I mean, 'don't deport people.'
I mean Sokovia was dissolved because its capital was destroyed by Ultron.
I think it was "open borders" ala Europe and not "one world."
I mean, it was definitely a Cozy Catastrophe. Civilization continued to function, there was no massive families, and people were living in cities with no nukes flying or anything like that.
I mean, it's, "Deal with systemic issues that create terrorism." I'm not sure that's a bad message.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jul 12th 2022 at 5:45:25 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
On Sokovia, we don't have a timeline, but having a capital destroyed very much does not destroy a country and certainly doesn't have it 'dismembered and its territory claimed by its neighbors.'
But again, you skip over the whole, Karli is cast as 'right, but gone too far' but she is exactly as toxically nostalgic as the GRC. Her argument isn't 'we'll build a better tomorrow' it's 'things were good until these bastards came along'.
Edited by ECD on Jul 12th 2022 at 5:59:01 AM
If Sharon hadn't been the Power Broker and I wanted to do a more "Winter Soldier" esque arc,
I would have made the following changes:
- Karli is actually a agent provocateur for the Shadow Broker
- Karli has been arming all of the camps.
- The Flagsmashers will be unloading on the people about to deport all the people and cause massive bloodshed.
- The Shadow Broker will use this as an excuse to crack down and destroy the camps.
- The Shadow Broker is actually being paid by the US Senator who works for Hydra and wants to get rid of "excess people." Possibly even saying Thanos was right.
- Sam exposed all of this with Bucky's help and the camps are dismantled with everyone allowed to stay in their countries of choice with promises of government help.
I think it could just be a case where the show was trying to make real world metaphors that did not really hold up. If it was meant to be a Covid parallel like I heard people say...Its not exactly a good one
Both involve people saying stuff on 'We should not just "go back to normal"', but in the real world people say that because they want more change, for the systemic issues that led to the big disaster being addressed. Not because life in lockdown was so much better or whatever. People who were saying things like how we should stay like under lockdown were doing so because the pandemic was still happening and it needed to be handled, instead of pretending the problem was gone when it was not. It is not, again, just because things were good under lockdown.
Bow to the Prototype

Also, your "oh, she's not being literal, she's talking like a normal person" explanation, even if we ignore there's no reason for the writers to not have her be literal there, kinda implies that it's abnormal for people in real-life to actually be literal? Like, nothing indicates she's not being literal. There's no real reason for her not to be literal in-universe. There's negative reasons for her not to be literal out-of-universe.
Edited by Larkmarn on Jul 12th 2022 at 11:14:50 AM
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