• Member Since 11th Nov, 2014
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wingdingaling


Just a guy who only recently got into MLP: FIM. Saw the first few episodes with my niece and nephew and wanted to see more.

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  • 1 week
    The Room Analysis: Finale

    1:26:27-1:39:35

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Nine

    1:17:19-1:26:26

    Continuing the trend of unnecessarily long scenes that don’t belong in this film, the scene cuts to the San Francisco skyline once again. Only this time, it’s at night. And it drags on for a good fifteen seconds, which for some reason feels like a lot longer.

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Eight

    1:09:00-1:17:18

    We’ll be doing things a bit differently for the rest of the week. Since there are only three more entries to go in this analysis, there will be an additional analysis posted tomorrow, as well as Friday. Right? Good. Let’s dive in.

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Seven

    1:00:57-1:08:59

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part 6

    00:51:42-1:00:56

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    0 comments · 22 views
May
10th
2023

Empress Theresa: Chapter Nineteen Analysis · 5:52pm May 10th, 2023

Scherzer goes back to his home country and assures the Israeli people that Theresa will help, and that anyone who challenges her is a fool, because she has the power to destroy the world. Since we already know how powerful Theresa is, and how beloved she is by the general populace, and how anyone who dares oppose her is humiliated or jailed, any potential conflict that can come of this is pretty much voided, no matter what the author tries to throw in.

Theresa begins her project to raise the seabed from along the Antarctic coast. What do you know? People are amazed at Theresa’s ability and everyone loves her. All except for one dissenting US senator (we’re probably supposed to think that it’s a Republican), who says that Theresa is tearing up masses of land bigger than New York City every fifteen minutes, and that she’s the most dangerous person who ever lived. After what Theresa did to all those lawyers and terrorists, that’s fair to say.. Guess what? He’s treated as just another dismissible buffoon. Because heaven forbid anyone should ever criticize the wonder that is Theresa.

Boutin tries to subvert our expectations by having crowds protest Theresa’s actions, even though just a few pages ago they were worshipping her. Stinson calls, telling Theresa to cease and desist, even though she signed a paper that would allow Theresa any means to her ends. She demands that Theresa meet with her, and Theresa makes an ill-timed and ill-placed reference to Burt Ward’s Robin (Holy smokes, Batman!) Theresa demands an apology for her attempted assassination from fifteen chapters ago, then hangs up. For some reason that is beyond us, she demands this apology from a completely different person from the one who actually tried to assassinate her.

The phone rings almost immediately afterward. It’s Blair. He says he’s sending soldiers and anti-aircraft cannons to the Parkers’ house, just in case anyone from the US tries to kill Theresa. Imagine the US risking war by invading the UK, just to bomb a single person. Come to think of it, this was the plot of ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut,’ where the Canadians invaded the US, just so they could bomb Alec Baldwin, thus beginning a war. I mention this parallel, so that I can point out the sheer absurdity of this situation.

By the next morning, the entire house has been turned into a fortress of heavy artillery and hundreds of soldiers. This is televised so that the entire world may know about this. Instead of anything exciting or suspenseful, we get a boring description of Theresa making a channel along the Antarctic coast. By the next day (we’re two days in with nothing of not happening), Theresa starts making a spectacular show by throwing up chunks of rock and ice into the air from Antarctica. Stinson makes it a point to go on live TV at four o’ clock AM to tell people not to distract Theresa during her business.

The world begins to fixate on what Theresa’s doing, because she hadn’t made this plan public yet. We already know exactly what she’s doing, but there are pages of detail about the process of Theresa’s project. A competent author would have left the audience as clueless as the general public and allowed them to figure out what was going on as the plan unfolded. Instead, everything comes off as boring and uninteresting to the point where we’d rather be reading something more stimulating. Finally, after six days and almost three pages of exposition, Theresa raises that new island for oil drilling. And Theresa goes to bed, bitter about the fact that nobody has apologized to her yet. She has all this other business, and all she can think about is how nobody has given her an apology that they have no business giving her. This is one of the hallmarks of a tendency for interpersonal victimhood.

I’ve talked about this before, but for anyone who does not know, a tendency for interpersonal victimhood (TIV) is a psychological profile where a person makes being hurt, weak and aggrieved a central part of their identity. While a narcissist would become angry at the idea of losing power and control, someone with TIV will go on the attack when their victimhood is questioned or refuted. There are four distinct traits that diagnose it: the first is a pathological desire for notoriety. This is where a person makes sure that everyone knows what a victim they are by broadcasting it in any way they can. Social media, blog posts and YouTube videos are popular modern options. The second is the inability to feel empathy or sympathy. This means that no matter how badly anybody else is suffering, you always feel like your problems are worse. The third, a grandiose feeling of moral elitism. Anything you do is justified, because you’re fighting bad people. You’ve been hurt so badly that not it’s okay to hurt everyone else. Finally, rumination. This means that no matter how much time has passed, you will continue to think about the perceived wrongs against yourself, and you will desire vengeance against those people. You will develop elaborate revenge fantasies, or make them the targets of your social media notoriety posts. Based on all of this, you can tell that Theresa displays all four signs of TIV. And that is not the kind of person you want in charge of anything. You don’t even want to hire this kind of person as a janitor.

Let’s talk about another strange phenomenon that I’ve witnessed in my years of mingling with other writers. There’s this strange thing where people who write bad stories, but claim they are actually good stories (be they original works or fanfictions). They seem to obsess over apologies. Characters will spend several paragraphs of pointless dialogue apologizing to each other over the littlest things as if it were a pivotal plot point. And in someone else’s story, they comment on why some character didn’t apologize for something, even though the two characters are clearly back on good terms without a verbal exchange. But if a character doesn’t apologize at all, then they’re treated like they’re some kind of monster. It’s baffling. It’s naive. It’s hilarious. I can think of one particularly strange comment about apologies that always makes me laugh, but let’s get back to the story.

Blair visits the next morning and asks if HAL now poses a danger, since it now has a reflex that can destroy entire landmasses. Theresa says no, it doesn’t. More suspense and excitement is voided, and we get a boring explanation of how Theresa will use any excess carbon that she’s mined from the sun to make into diamonds. Will she stabilize the economy that way too? No. She’ll put them into orbit around the Earth to refract enough light to create twenty-four hour daylight during the Israelis’ exodus from Israel. Couldn’t she just stop the Earth’s rotation? She already fucked up its axis.

So, we pointlessly recap the plan to evacuate the entire population of Israel, which is going to happen in three weeks. Blair announces the existence of oil on Theresa’s new island without any positive proof, and OPEC starts scrambling to try and learn the full facts of what’s going on, and realize that they’ve ended themselves for opposing Theresa. Once again, the world loves Theresa, and she’s considered the greatest human being who ever lived.

Theresa spends another page raising up the island for the Israelis to move to, then another few paragraphs explaining about all the oil that’s been found on that other island she raised. The chapter closes with her feeding chipmunks.

Boy what a rollercoaster this chapter was. People love Theresa. Then they hate her! Then they love her again! It’s all just a big popularity contest for her. As far as I can tell, there was no point to this chapter. We’re supposed to be building up toward something big, but it’s all falling flat before its first step on the runway.

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