Indiana Jones and the Last Franchise

As above, so below.

Every day is a gift. Sometimes, it doesn’t quite feel like it. Lord knows there are those times where getting out of bed feels like more of a burden than it should on even the best of days. You wake up, staring at the ceiling, just the way you were when you passed out while counting the mountains and valleys in the popcorn texturing overhead, while the sun filters in through the blinds. You feel the last phantom touch of a hand from a dream disappear from your face, the illusion dispelled by the light of a new day. There’s something to be said for the virtue of learning to savor a new dawn. Each day presents new opportunities. New chances to try again. New chances to do something different. You have a fresh new slate of opportunities before you, and, while some may seem inconsequential in the moment, and the reward may not be immediate, you’re always able to plant the seeds of something that will grow into a beautiful tree, with leafy branches heavy with delicious fruit.

And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.

The fall of the House of Mouse would be sad, if it weren’t so funny. There’s something tragic about the gradual and agonizing decline of a true institution of American culture if there ever was one, especially if you choose to believe the more sanitized version of the Disney story, in which Uncle Walt was a fascist hating patriot, a freedom-loving capitalist of the highest order, a true visionary, a futurist, with a deep, abiding respect for traditional values. The guy was an icon of American values. A hard-working, innovative man from humble beginnings who, with nothing but an idea, built an empire.

Man dripped hard.

There’s something to be said for that. The man was not without his merits, skill, talents, and intelligence. But, one must remind themselves of his… more questionable endeavors. And, no, I don’t mean to reference the usual Dark Side of Disney pablum, where baseless accusations of anti-semitism¹, slightly less baseless claims of demon worship and human sacrifice on park grounds, and other creepypasta bunk; I’m talking about Walt’s deep, deep connection with the military, which probably extended into various alphabet agencies and the kind of government organizations that don’t exist on paper. Both the military and Disney - both the company and the man - were proud to bandy about the animated propaganda films produced during the Second World War. The Department of Defense even has an article about it on their own website - Google it if you want, I’m not linking it here.

Huh… you don’t say.

That relationship goes beyond discounts for veterans at the park and cartoons of Donald Duck slapping Hitler, or whatever. Digging into the history behind Disney World, you realize that Walt had no small amount of help from the brass when it came to securing the land he needed to convert the swamps around Orlando, Florida, into what today would be considered a fifteen-minute smart city in all but name. Because the Japanese Empire launching a totally unprovoked and definitely unforeseen surprise attack and sinking a handful of battleships that had been very conspicuously and conveniently moved into shallow water the day before wasn’t enough to galvanize the young men of America to enter the meat grinder of the South Pacific, who did the military turn to for racist propaganda cartoons?

As a brief aside, I also find it equal parts tragic, humorous, and pernicious that there were no shortage of young Americans who’d probably never seen hide nor hair of anyone from East of Russia that saw these dogshit cartoons and went out expecting to stack the bodies of a bunch of short, squat, buck-toothed, bespectacled neanderthals:

“Aaawrh, dese schtupit Amelicans wirr neval schee disch wan coming…”

That ended up getting gutted at the business end of a bayonet when it turned out the Japanese were less bumbling subhumans and more like this:

Just something to keep in mind when you start seeing anti-Chinese memes in the near future.

Aside from cartoons, Disney also produced informational videos about military equipment, including flight instruction videos for prospective pilots and lessons on various guns and how to maintain them.

This is a rabbit hole I really didn’t mean to start falling down, so, before we end tumble headfirst into Wonderland, here are some pictures. I’ll leave you to connect the dots between them on your own.

Primer.

Shot.

Chaser.

Call it a hunch.

Anyways, I prime the actual, salient point of this essay with that as a way of saying, shed no tears for the fallen state of Disney. Even if Walt was truly as virtuous a man and honest in his intentions as the hagiography around him would lead one to believe, then he’d probably rather see the Magic Kingdom dismantled than continue to be corrupted and subverted for evil purposes. And make no mistake - they are evil. Disney’s recent, cynical dalliances with the Rainbow Coalition is just one of their most open and flagrant displays of contempt for Middle America, but I’d argue that their whole-sale consumption of entire swathes of the media landscape in this country is by far and away more sinister, if only because it gave them a bigger platform from which to broadcast their message and material to corrupt.

Example - National Geographic, which, through some sort of corporate wizardry, ended up under the Disney umbrella.

Now, National Geographic suffered the same sorry decline as every other mass publication and media outlet. I used to read it myself, keeping them in the bathroom for light reading in the advent of the smart phone era, but these days, it’s little more than just another neo-liberal propaganda rag. It’s been in a terminal slide into irrelevancy for years, now - probably for that exact reason - so, maybe it’s a good thing the Mouse is putting it down like a diseased chihuahua that’s more cancer than dog. Yet, like watching a gormless meth-junkie desperately root around the moth-eaten couch cushions in a stately yet abandoned manor for loose change, it is still somewhat sad to see something once so well-respected gutted and stripped by Disney so they can fund another ugly bucket of animated slop for their miserable horde of MKUltra’d Disney Adults, since those seem to be the only people even turning up to the theater to see their latest flops.

Sorry, folks - Toy Story 8 ain’t gonna pay for itself!

Remember when they bought - sorry, acquired 20th Century Fox? If this was a serious country, and we had functioning courts that adhered to the anti-monopoly laws that we supposedly have in place, that would not have happened. Once they acquired that studio, well north of fifty percent of that year’s total box office haul belonged to the Mouse alone. It may seem a bit difficult to remember, given their current financial woes, but I’m sure you can recall when it looked as if Disney was going to quite literally snap up every media property in Hollywood, by hook or crook. I’d say it’s a good thing that they stopped, but no IP is really better off in the grubby mitts of Warner Brothers or Comcast, either. The crown jewel of Disney’s rapid expansion in the late 2000’s, more so than Marvel - which was considered a steal for Bob Iger at the time, who basically bought it for pennies on the dollar - or Jim Henson Studios, was, of course, LucasFilm.

Which brings us to today.

With all the grace and dignity of a mid-morning bowel movement after crushing a six pack of Rainier tallboys the night before, the Mouse just dropped a new Indiana Jones into theaters.

You know it. I know it. The cottage industry of angry YouTube critiques kvetching about Kathleen Kennedy certainly know it, since it’s been paying their rent ever since LucasFilm announced the fucking thing months ago. Oh, and, by the way guys, this really is the end of Kathleen Kennedy. She’s going to be fired from LucasFilm this time. Seriously. No, really. My inside sources told me. Just trust me.

Please subscribe bro I’m serious bro it’s really happening bro you gotta believe me also please subscribe to my patreon.

I won’t justify the existence of this shambling, zombified corpse of a franchise and say the movie anything other than bad, since I haven’t seen it, I wouldn’t pay a penny to see it, and, short of Bob Iger or Harrison Ford handing me an oversized, novelty check for a million dollars, no force on Heaven nor Earth could get my ass in a theater seat to see it.

I don’t need to see it to know damn well it’s just a pathetic attempt at a Hail Mary pass to scrape together a few dollars off nothing but nostalgia, and it failed. Miserably. Due to extensive reshoots which may or may not have constituted re-filming basically the whole movie, constant delays caused by both COVID and on-set injuries, it’s on track to be one of the most expensive movies ever made, and also one of the biggest financial losses ever taken on a movie, to which I can only say to the penny-pinching pricks at Disney who calculated their way into this pickle with power-point presentations and graphs -

But, really, I’m not here to discuss the quality of the movie (it’s bad) or the box office projections (they’re worse). What’s been eating at me over the past weekend - aside from haunting memories of a past lovers, once so dear, now but strangers, replaying in my head along the rain-slick streets of Seattle - is this question: do we curse the names of those who hurt us worst, or should we thank them for hurting us in ways that make us the people we are? A mended bone is stronger than before, and, even if the pain of - oh, fuck me. I’m getting my thoughts mixed up again, damn it.

You tried to teach me so much about myself but I learned more from your absence than you could have ever hoped to impart.

Okay. No.

What I meant to say is… where does Hollywood go from here? Disney in particular is in a particularly prickly situation. After a string of box-office belly flops, they’re facing a billion - with a b - dollars in collective losses in over a year.

Ever since they had to release Avengers: Endgame twice in the most blatantly pathetic (but successful) attempt to make it the highest grossing movie of all time, the Marvel Cinematic Universe experiment has entered a seemingly unstoppable tailspin into the dirt. The return on investment for each successive installment has been less and less, now that money-making titans like Chris Evans’ Captain America and Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man jumped ship. After a string of billion-dollar box office smashes, the hits have certifiably dried up, with only one recent entry making over a billion dollars, and even then, Spider-man: No Way Home only did so by putting Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire back into spider suits.

And that’s a trick that’ll only work once.

The rot is so pervasive that even the last Guardians of the Galaxy entry recently limped out of theaters collecting only slightly more than it’s previous installment. The ever-shrinking pool of fervent Marvel stans will claim, YakubianApe, you uncultured simian, the Guardians of the Galaxy were never all that popular. You’re just exaggerating.

To which I have to assume this individual was either A) too young or B) too disingenuous to recall when the first Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack became the biggest album in the country.

Seriously, an entire generation of children who’s parents utterly failed them were introduced to the concept of good music by this movie. I was in college at the time, and even I remember this being the song that defined the year.

I’m sure that the surprise popularity of Guardians of the Galaxy actually had nothing to do with with this sudden resurgence in the popularity of the Jackson 5, and college students across the country just suddenly and spontaneously became inexplicably fascinated by 60’s Motown hits.

Adults and children everywhere just suddenly loved this fucker for no reason, too.

I swear, this was the precursor to the Baby Yoda phenomenon, only less insane.

The t-shirts, the plush toys, the boomer Facebook memes, all with that little grooving chia pet - yeah, it all just came out of nowhere because, y’know, people never actually really cared about Guardians of the Galaxy. Kinda screwy how, in their attempts to defend

The saddest part of all is that I actually saw the new Guardians of the Galaxy. It was the best Marvel movie since… well, actually since the second one, which I like a lot. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 would have been a shoe-in for a billion dollar box office smash, but the Marvel brand is so poisoned by stinkers like Black Panther 2 and Thor: Love and Thunder that general audiences don’t want to get their hands dirty sifting through manure to find the rare diamond the MCU might make by accident. Think of all the poor kids of today who’s parents have failed them who will never be introduced to all-time GOATed rock songs like this masterpiece of 80’s ephemera because they never saw Guardians of the Galaxy 3.

I’m seriously considering starting a charitable organization to make sure that children know there’s actual music that exists outside of what they see on brain-melting Cocomelon and Pinkfong videos, so they hopefully don’t grow up to be SoundCloud rappers. Somebody has to.²

But, Marvel still hasn’t bottomed out just yet. They still have some gas in the tank, though, I’m not sure how much. There are still two phases, as they call them, to slog through, but I’d be surprised if they continue at pace without massive course correction. They have to own to the fact that they decided to follow-up Thanos, of all characters - arguably a D-rate figure from the comics that is now one of the most recognizable villains in cinematic history - they chose the even more obscure Kang the Conqueror and tapped a totally talentless hack who also happens to be a narcissistic, abusive maniac - Johnathan Majors - to play him, setting him up as the next end-all-be-all villain for their current crop of films. How’s that working out?

Oh.

Well, let’s just say if they continue the Kang storyline, I think they’re gonna need a… Majors change in casting!

Oh… I crack myself up. I have to. If I don’t make everything into a joke, the crushing pressure of it all would destroy me.

But, that being said, you know what else is destroyed? Just absolutely pulverized to a fine dust, like some of my dreams?

I think I’ve said enough about this in other articles. I’m going to say more about it, too, for better or worse worse, in the future, so, the less said here, the better. Now, Indiana Jones and Star Wars weren’t the only IP that LucasFilm had lying around.

What? You don’t know? Oh - oh, no. You can’t be serious. You - wow. You really forgot? You seriously forgot about it? Are you honestly telling me that you don’t remember?

You uncultured swine… how could you forget Willow? Yes, yes - for those who never saw this forgotten gem of 80’s fantasy cheese on VHS at their grandparent’s house as an impressionable child, after Ol’ Georgie struck gold in the sci-fi genre, he made a stab at doing the same with fantasy. The results? Well, it didn’t fail - it made back its budget and then some. But critical reception was middling and it didn’t really find its legs until it came out on home video. It’s a shame, really. The movie is far from perfect, but it’s one of those 80’s fantasy movies with a impeccable aesthetics, fun action, and stellar effects by Lucas’s Industrial Lights & Magic that don’t all hold up today, but definitely lend the movie a certain charm that just can’t be replicated today. When I say they don’t make movies like this today, they don’t. They especially don’t make fantasy movies like this anymore, because, for some reason, my favorite genre is the one they feel the most compelled to thoroughly ruin. For years, now, they’ve waffled on whether or not Willow warranted a sequel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that one only came about in 2022, after the thorough thrashing of the Star Wars IP.

It failed. Miserably. I didn’t watch it because I’m quite fond of the original Willow, and I may be a glutton for punishment, but even I have my standards.

Look at this picture of the core cast. It’s all you really need to see. They say a picture is worth a thousand words - this one screams just one particular word, and it’s a deafening, full-throated roar of SUCK. It’s supposed to take place in a fantastical parallel of Europe, but, for some reason, the prince is played by Tony Revolori - a Guatemalan - who is also a whiny bitch that gets cucked by… well, I’m not sure what exactly the young woman on the far right is, what with the African features, bright, curly orange hair, and absolutely no fucking acting ability³, but she ends up snagging the girl to her left, who’s the perfect brunette action girl a la Rey from the new Star Wars movies. There’s also the ditzy pale blonde servant girl who contributes nothing to the story except to be the butt of the joke, because of the persistent psy-op that blondes are stupid, and some Indian fellow LARPing as Val Kilmer’s character, Madmartigan, from the original film. Literally larping, actually, because he’s pretending to be Madmartigan, for… reasons. And, hey, they had to put Madmartigan’s name in there somewhere, since he was one of the best parts of the original movie, but with Val Kilmer currently on death’s door, well… ya work with what ya got.

Oh, and, uh… Willow is there too, I guess.

Can’t imagine why a show called Willow in which Willow is practically a background character in a poorly contrived lesbian romance that just happens to be named after him failed spectacularly. It is truly a mystery.

And, with the failure of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the Indiana Jones franchise is -

Oh God, please, please, please do not let them get their hands on the Oz books…

And with that last vestige of greatness gone, Star Wars dead, and even poor Willow dragged out of obscurity to be shaken down for what little pocket change it still had, LucasFilm… well, I’m gonna make another movie reference. Forgive me.

I’m on a roll today.

It’s not just Disney that’s rapidly running out of IP’s to mine for scraps faster than I’m running out of hope for the future. Let’s do a brief whirlwind tour of some other major legacy franchises, yeah? Do a bit of doom sightseeing. Gawk at the destruction and the veritable mountains of burning cash and wasted effort behind them.

Star Trek?

Yeah there’s also Star Trek Discovery but I am so sick to fucking death of this god awful, dollar store Rick and Morty aesthetic getting into everything.

Lord of the Rings?

The Matrix?

Ghostbusters?

Scooby-fucking-doo?

As heinous and reprehensible as this show was, at least it didn’t look like Rick and Morty.

And, yeah, look, I know they’re rebooting the whole DC Cinematic Universe under the guidance of James Gunn. Yes, he was able to make Guardians of the Galaxy into what it was. Yes, he probably could make a decent DC Cinematic Universe? Well, the man took no-name Marvel Z-listers and turned them into some of the MCU’s most popular figures, so I think he’s definitely got the creative chops to work some wonders. The real question is whether or not Warner Brothers will let him. Or will they usually do and let a committee dictate what should and shouldn’t go on screen based on the algorithms and esoteric calculations of the bean-counting wizards in their accounting department? I mean, that’s what they did for the past fifteen years, and that directly led to this garbage currently languishing in theaters like an open, festering, bleeding sore.

I could go on with other examples, but you get the gist.

Hollywood, however, still has a few tricks up its filthy, sweat-stained sleeve. They still have a few more ratty old sofa’s to rifle through before they’re totally out of ideas, and, to be fair, there’s probably a few IP’s out there I’m either forgetting about or are so obscure that they’ll surprise everyone when they announce an inevitable reboot.

Personally, I have money riding on some of the old Sid and Marty Kroft IP’s being re-imagined for a modern audience. The fact H.R. Pufnstuf or Lidsville haven’t been retooled into some ultra-trippy, psychedelic nightmare is really a crime, because that’s about the one reboot I would want to actually see.

So, uh… Jason Blum. On the off chance that you’re reading this right now, call me. Let’s do lunch. I got ideas. Big ideas.

I mean, you took a chance on this, right?

I don’t just bring up Five Nights at Freddy’s as a joke. Actually, the IP literally prints money, which is pretty impressive for what started as a last-ditch attempt by a beleaguered and weary one-man game developer to make one successful project before resigning himself to wage slavery at his day job managing a Dollar General in rural Texas. Yes, that really is how Five Nights at Freddy’s started. Inspirational story, honestly.

When the game came out in 2014, it was a sleeper hit that no one would have ever predicted - least of all developer Scott Cawthorne - would turn into the juggernaut it is today. It’s one of the few properties younger than a decade (though not by much) that Hollywood seems willing to take a chance on. Given their aversion to anything that they can’t reliably mine for 80’s nostalgia, I’m surprised it got picked up for a movie at all. Still, all of the Five Nights at Freddy’s games collectively have raked in an estimated thirty three million dollars in cold, hard cash for Mr. Cawthorne, which, for a game he made in a week for free, I’d say is a pretty solid return on investment. Keep in mind each game is, like, ten dollars at most, so, it’s not like these are fully-priced Triple A games, or anything. This is to say nothing about the profits from merchandise, which I’d imagine is an equally impressive sum. This is all to say that Five Nights at Freddy’s is not exactly a risky bet at the box office, now that the long awaited Blumhouse movie is on the horizon. This isn’t some quirky idea or high concept elevator pitch by an auteur with a dream. It’s a proven commodity.

Another example of a relatively fresh IP that, regrettably, doesn’t seem to be going anywhere is James Cameron’s Avatar.

If I had my way, the Navi (I don’t know who it’s spelled and I don’t care) would be hunted to extinction, taxidermied, put in a museum display, and their whole planet strip-mined for every molecule of valuable elements in it, but unfortunately, the latest installment, after a whole bloody decade in development, made enough money to warrant letting Mr. Cameron spend the rest of his natural life working on the sequels.

Yay.

Point is, Five Nights at Freddy’s and Avatar do prove the Hydra of the Entertainment Industry and Pop culture will adopt new members into the family of legacy IPs, but they’re burning through reliable cash cows faster than they can be replaced.

And there’s precious few old ones remaining.

Warner Brother’s still has Harry Potter to rely on. Even though JK Rowling has been admirably doing everything in her power to piss off the weirdos who still identify themselves by their Hogwarts house to the point they jump ship, the most recent game, Hogwarts Legacy, did gangbusters, even though there was a vociferous campaign of harassment by the Rainbow Mafia against anyone who dared play it. Whether the boycott hindered or, I suspect, helped sales, the game did quite well, which means we’ll get another in short order. Unfortunately, there’s also a Harry Potter television series that will re-imagine the books, albeit in a long-form, Game of Thrones-esque multi-series epic. I’d rather re-imagine being strangled by Voldemort’s pet snake, but I know I know that, like so many of my prayers, the answer will be a firm and certain no, and this show will make beaucoup bucks.

I usually think that anything can be cool, if handled properly, but this… this is really putting that theory to the test.

Ultimately, though, I don’t think that Harry Potter is an ever-green property. There simply isn’t enough to it or its expanded universe to make it so. Despite being one of the most successful series of novels in the history of literature, I do not think - and this may be a bold statement to make - there will be future literary scholars dedicated to pouring over and meticulously analyzing the works of Rowling as there are for Tolkein, Lewis, and Lovecraft. This isn’t just because Tolkein, Lewis, and Lovecraft each had more talent in one fingernail-clipping than Rowling does in the entirety of her body, but the Harry Potter franchise is completely and totally dependent on the central character - Harry Potter.

Look at the official name of the setting and expanded universe - the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.

Of Harry Potter.

It’s not just the Wizarding World. Oh, no - it’s Harry’s world, and everyone else is just living in it. This is why all of the expanded universe material has been so lackluster and poorly received, even by the fans. There’s really no meat to them beyond how they relate back to the Wizard Messiah, Mr. Potter himself. It’s hilariously ironic that all of the spin-off material is marketed as an attempt to explore the Wizarding World, when, at the end of the day, it all just ends up exploring how many degrees from Harry Potter they can go before the thread snaps.

The atrocious batch of spin-offs called Fantastic Beasts, which was such a misfire that the last planned movie in the series was unceremoniously canned, take the story to Depression-era New York. Even there, they awkwardly shoehorn in Hogwarts and Dumbledore and the LeStrange family, because these things were in the book, and God forbid Rowling ever strays too far from the familiar.

Even in the Legacy game, which takes place in the late 1880’s, the halls of Hogwarts are still populated by the antecedents of Sirius Black, Neville Longbottom, the Weasley family, and others.

Yo… Ron’s great-great grandma is kinda bad with it, tho…

It seems as if the Wizarding World is always tertiary to Harry Potter himself. I’m fairly certain that if the setting was ever taken to the 1100’s, you’d still see Potters, Weasleys, and Malfoys running around, doing wizardly battles with vikings, or something.

This cannot continue forever, and it certainly won’t keep paying dividends. The key difference between Rowling’s creation and those of the aforementioned authors is that they produced timeless works. Harry Potter has certain timeless and mythopoetic elements in it, but it is a distinctly neo-liberal take on the fantasy (or perhaps urban fantasy, given the time period) genre that is deeply rooted in the late 90’s and Blair-era Britain. Settings like Tolkein’s Middle-Earth, or even Lucas’s Star Wars Galaxy, are timeless because they are wholly divorced from our reality. Lovecraft’s mythos, even though steeped in the aesthetics of Depression-era New England, is more of a theme than a setting - trappings of creeping dread, crippling paranoia, and ancient horrors, all of which can easily be transposed to other settings and work just as well.

Now, in the hands of a competent author or creative team, I don’t think exploring other areas of the Wizard World (God, I really hate that name) that have nothing to do with Harry and pals would be impossible. Tough, maybe, but not impossible. But, such an endeavor would require Rowling to, y’know, actually create something new rather than rely on the same tropes and characters she’s been driving harder than rented mules for the past two decades.

She’d have to do better than fucking this when it comes to world building, that’s for damn sure.

The Harry Potter series, while not deeply rooted in the aesthetics of Blairite England, is intrinsically tied to the neo-liberal politics that dominated that time and place. This is something I’d like to go into in another article, and something that others have already written about and elaborated on in other ways (Dave Greene touches on it some in this essay here). Thus, I think the further away we move from the time,place, and culture that birthed the Boy who Lived, the less staying power he’ll have. The Wizarding World is either too flimsy and thin to support its own weight without Harry Potter holding it up, or Rowling is too afraid or too spent to dream up anything fresh and unqiue. Either way, there’s only so much that can be done with the Wizarding World’s current model of content creation.

It doesn’t help that, much like the Star Wars property, Harry Potter’s cultural impact and relevance to younger generations is waning, and sharply. You know how Disney has been marketing Nu-Star Wars almost exclusively to goony man-children to milk them of their disposable income, with lip-service to young girls for inlcusivity’s sake? Warner Brothers have been doing much the same with Harry Potter, but focusing on the aging millennial women that still claim to be waiting on their Hogwarts acceptance letter. Make no mistake - Harry Potter is not a series for children. It hasn’t been for a long time. It’s a series chiefly for adults who were children when the books first came out, and have refused to grow beyond it.

This, however, is not a bad thing. As we are now over twenty years removed from Tony Blair’s stint as prime minister of England, and rapidly approaching thirty since the publication of the first Harry Potter novel, I think it’s safe to say that the franchise is well past its sell-by date. One day - and, hopefully sooner than any of us think - the whole mess will be confined to the annals of pop culture history, and be remembered for exactly what it was; a slightly above average series of young adult novels, written by a woman with strictly average talent who just happened to catch lightning in a bottle.

Speaking of authors who caught lightning in a bottle and legacy IPs that still have some juice in their battery, HBO’s House of the Dragon seems to have earned back some of the good-will that the botched ending to the original series totally squandered. It really goes to show how minuscule the public’s attention span really is, when people were ready to lynch the showrunners in the street in the aftermath of Game of Thrones miserable finale, but, now, suddenly, everyone is back on the hype-train. Or back on the dragon, I guess.

Even my own father was insisting that House of the Dragon is worth watching, but I categorically refuse to be suckered into another eight seasons of steady decline that ends not with a bang or a whimper but a wet fart. I’ve also grown weary of George R.R. Martin’s cynicism. It’s novel, at first, after a while, it just get’s exhausting. The man is more talented than Rowling, that’s for sure, but, to give credit where credit is due, when Rowling sets out to do something, at least she does it. Martin, on the other hand, is rapidly alienating his most devoted followers, who have been more than patient waiting for him to finish the latest installment into the Game of Thrones book series. I suspect it’ll be published post-mortem, and finished by, like, Brandon T. Sanderson, or some other jobber in the fantasy sphere. Place your bets in the comments below.

So, no. I don’t think I need more Westeros in my life. I won’t let Westeros or the Starks or that bloviating, lazy shit Martin back into my life. The thing is, everyone deserves a second chance, but they aren’t entitled to one from you. To forgive someone is not synonymous with condoning their actions. You don’t have to let them back into your life.

Do I look both ways when I cross your mind?

Fucking hell - I’m doing it again.

That’s enough of this. I think I’ve made my point. Hollywood still has a few viable IPs to keep the machinery running for a bit longer, but they’re killing them off before they can be replaced. They’re facing a reproductive crisis on par with the rest of Western civilization.

Ironic, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s apropos - a society in what feels like terminal, almost suicidal decline, surrounded by pop culture that seems to be imploding, pillar by pillar, icon by icon. The creative spark that spurred the creation of Star Wars, or the works of Lovecraft and Tolkein and even Disney, has burned out, or, perhaps, been stamped out by malicious actors. These intellectual properties remain like ancient tools created by better, more robust men than those of our own time, who take what was left to us and desecrate it in the name of profit, supposed progress, and in some cases, just plain sadistic cruelty, and the peurile joy of watching a great man’s hard work burn.

My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives - some of them gave their lives - so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.

Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.

All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city - it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.

Worse still, they have the audacity to make you pay for it. And their, er… improvements? Yeah, they ain’t cheap.

Typical corporate move, right? Take something good, strip it down, make it worse, and sell it back at a premium.

I’ve always said that politics is downstream of culture.

As above…

So below, I suppose.

1. Which, from what I can tell, were first levied against him during an animators strike, in which a good deal of the striking animators were Jewish. Curious.

2. I remember being mad at my father for playing exclusively hair metal and hard rock in the car when I was a kid, but now, I’m thankful he never capitulated and listened to whatever Disney shit I wanted to hear.

3. I’ve seen her in other things, because someone, somewhere, is shoving her ugly mug into everything they can, like a kid holding some gross bug up to your face and going LOOK AT IT! LOOK AT IT!