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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.

More Blog Posts39

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    The Room Analysis: Finale

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  • 1 week
    The Room Analysis: Part Nine

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  • 2 weeks
    The Room Analysis: Part Eight

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    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

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    The Room Analysis: Part 6

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May
24th
2023

Empress Theresa: Chapter Twenty-Six Analysis · 6:16pm May 24th, 2023

The chapter opens with a pseudo-intellectual quote that only turns out to be Theresa boasting about her greatness. Then she boasts about all of the good things that he has in her life, probably as a way to justify how great she is. Then she basks in the praises that people heap upon her as she does pretty much nothing to turn North Korea into a democracy, but says that she does and expects us to take her word for it. Show. Don’t tell. Put up or shut up. She does tell us that she plans to make it just one whole Korea that isn’t divided into North and South, but we still don’t know how this goal will be accomplished.

It seems that Boutin is pondering his own mortality as Theresa begins to say that she had always been interested in human biology, why people age, and why they die. No she hasn’t, because this was never addressed at a single point in the story before. She wanted to be a math teacher, last time I checked. By the way, there is no mystery to preserving youth. Practice regular hygiene. Exercise daily. Socialize without a screen. And for Pete’s sake, don’t eat processed, pre-packaged foods. That’ll keep you looking and feeling younger than you actually are.

Still, Theresa tries to get HAL to draw certain substances and contaminates out of water, and ends up making a gelatin-like mass that dissolves when she pours it out of its glass. Theresa rationalizes that she could make any surgery she wants be successful with her powers, but backpedals when she realizes how badly things could go wrong. How making gelatin from water would accomplish this is completely unknown to any of us, because that information was all in the author’s head and not on the page.

Theresa and Steve bounce between their homes at West Point and at New York, with absolutely no necessary information shared with the audience about it. All we do learn is that Theresa still doesn’t want to be glorified, as she now outright shuns people who so much as congratulate her for her victory in North Korea. This directly contradicts how full of herself she was on it at the beginning of the chapter. Any of this would make sense if Theresa were written as a two-faced, impetuous brat. But she isn’t supposed to be. She’s supposed to be a role model for young women the world over.

Theresa’s been using her eye in the sky power to assist in archaeological studies now. Finally, it seems like she’s doing something partway rational with her powers. And boy does she find something. The sequence of events is very murky here, but let’s try to sift through it. Theresa was searching for weapons in some other unknown threatening nation when she found something. Steve packed it up in a cardboard box and delivered it to Yeshiva University’s Jewish studies department, where it was revealed to be a scroll. Not just any scroll. It’s an original copy of the Book of Leviticus. It is deemed to be ‘the oldest document every[sic] found.’ When asked about where it was found, Steve gives a complete non-answer by saying that Theresa will want it back eventually, before he leaves. Talk about impoliteness. You’d think he’d share such a major cultural discovery with the people it would mean the most to, and then let them keep it. But Theresa really is an impetuous brat who has claimed finders-keepers, losers-weepers.

Suddenly there’s a huge buzz in the Jewish community about this history altering discovery. Steve won’t tell anyone where it was found still, but he claims to be offering clues as he spouts off numbers about temperature. If his gibberish is to be believed, the scroll he delivered was found somewhere between the Eastern coast of Spain and the Southern coast of France. And then there’s some jumble of words about Steve building a concrete wall around some building, even though we don’t know why he’s doing it. And there’s also narration that suggests that Theresa might not be back from North Korea yet, even though we’ve spent the last few pages reading about what she’s been doing back in the US. Consistency matters when it comes to writing. Keeping track of what your characters are doing shouldn’t be hard, so long as you’re invested in your work.

It turns out that Steve was building a supermarket before. Why? Let’s hope we find out. But there’s a bigger fish to gefilte, because PM Scherzer is coming to visit Theresa! And they meet at the supermarket, where they’re greeted by a huge, cheering crowd that Theresa assumes is mostly jewish! Why? Is it a ‘kosher only’ market? Nope. It’s because this was where Steve’s been storing all those scrolls that Theresa discovered…This is just another one of those times where I wish I was joking. Who in their right mind would keep a priceless historical artifact in the same storage as pesto? Those stains are a nightmare to get out.

Despite the incredible lack of common sense on display, Scherzer’s first question is to ask where they were found. Theresa refuses to answer, as she hasn’t even told Steve. Why not? This kind of information would greatly benefit the historical, anthropological, sociological and archaeological communities, along with several others. But we can only suppose that Theresa is just petty and selfish.

Once again, Theresa is lauded for her awesomeness. And she’s not done being awesome. She’s going to England to meet with a professor of medieval history. Using all of the knowledge that Boutin has learned from watching endless BBC documentaries, she begins to search for the tomb of William the Conqueror, but she ends up finding the lost remains of King Arthur! Understand that? He wasn’t just a legend! Oh, dear evil Jesus, can any more convoluted and irrelevant garbage be crammed into this story!?

Yes! She phones Blair to go on the next expedition. Through no logic, reasoning or work that is conveyed to us, Theresa leads an expedition to a church in France, where she has a team excavate the floor and discover the remains of Joan of Arc! And then we get a bunch of information about the parallels between Theresa and Joan. Did you know that Theresa’s birthday, May the 8th, is the day that Joan saved France? Big deal! What’s that have to do with the story, besides remind us how great Theresa is!? Before Theresa goes home, she’s given a lock of Joan’s dry and brittle corpse hair, and Theresa promises to build a Joan of Arc cathedral to house this gruesome souvenir. You know, instead of letting some professionals preserve it.

A short while after arriving home, Theresa is approached by the International Olympic Committee, who want her to custom make the greatest downhill ski course ever. Way too many words are spent on this completely pointless scene, and Theresa does so. The Olympics will never come up again in this story.

One day while Theresa is walking somewhere, surrounded by her army of government agents, she is hit by a car. How this happens isn’t really elaborated on, but that’s probably a good thing, considering the first person narrative. Theresa gets taken to the hospital, has emergency care, goes to sleep, and wakes up to find her husband and parents in the room with her. She learns that her assailant was (big surprise) a terrorist who wanted revenge against her for being so mean to all the other terrorists. It’s also revealed that Theresa may have become paralyzed by the accident, and she cries. It is emphatically pointed out that she has a reason to cry this time, as it seems that the author has been criticized by other people besides myself for all the other times Theresa has locked herself in her room and cried.

Way, way, way too many paragraphs are dedicated to Theresa’s adjustment to paraplegia, without ever connecting us to her or the people around her. We are just being hammered over the head endlessly and repeatedly with the information that Theresa is now in a wheelchair.

Going on for more than one paragraph about a particular topic is not a bad thing to do. Steinbeck was quite good at going on for several paragraphs about one topic. However, it must move on from one particular point that is being made to another so that we don’t learn the same thing over and over again. That way the audience remains engaged and might feel like they’ve learned something.

Well, now there’s a wheelchair ramp installed at the house in West Point. President Stinson comes by to visit, but not Blair or Scherzer. Fair weather friends, I suppose. Stinson gives a whole spiel about what a good person Theresa is, then asks what she’ll do next. Theresa elaborates about her sudden interest in biology and comes up with a plan on the spot to copy somebody else’s nerve cells to repair her damaged spinal cord. This was the entire point of stem cell research, in case you missed that controversy. The chapter then closes with Theresa elaborating a plan to stop herself from aging, showing that she knows nothing about how or why people age.

Once again, the entire point of this chapter seemed to be nothing but to show how amazing Theresa is. It completely glossed over how she brought democracy to North Korea and instead focused on all of her amazing historical and scientific discoveries. It’s perfectly obvious that Boutin’s been watching BBC documentaries to get the inspiration for this chapter, mainly because of his evident admiration of them from before. If there was any point at all to her ending up in a wheelchair is just to deflect criticisms about how nothing really bad seems to happen to Theresa. Since Boutin can’t have his perfect Mary Sue waifu in any real trouble for long, you can bet she’s going to be up and walking by the next chapter.

Two chapters to go. Let’s get this over with already.

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