I keep mentally referring to Ratched as American Horror Story: Disability, but that could really describe so much of Ryan Murphy's corpus.
I think the character of Ratched is better when she's unexplored and unexplained. You really don't need a Joker Origin Story for the ableist control freak medical professional who just bulldozes over patients' lives. That's *normal* in our society.
But as a prequel for the book/movie and an origin story for the character as she exists within it... Ratched worked better than I had expected? It understood the character better than it might have, showing a character who can identify institutional and personal pressure points.
We see her talking a fragile patient to death in order to hurt/gain control over another person, and misusing a lobotomy for personal reasons, the two most morally abhorrent actions she takes in the source material.
It's elaborately detailed, beautiful and harmful garbage... in other words, normal Ryan Murphy fare.
Yeah, she's very much like the "composite character" that gets added to non-fictional dramatizations in order to distill a lot of bad stuff happening in a way that is filmable and cinematic, and put a face on it.
It very much does feel like a spin-off season of American Horror Story, minus the presence of more of the AHS Repertory Players. (We kept waiting for Evan Peters to pop up, and declared numerous background characters and props to be him.)
It's got WLW playing WLW and finding (at least, temporary) happiness with each other. And it openly condemns the interlocking systems of "mental health" and "justice" that are also being openly abused (in ways apart from and beyond their abusive natures) by the characters.
The opening title design is gorgeous and seems calculated to (vainly, in my opinion) try to set it apart from the AHS oeuvre, with a distinctly different theme song (Camille Saint-Saëns's Danse Macabre) and overall aesthetic.
It's definitely interesting to see a queer female version of the "mastermind villain" who has elaborate plans within plans and immediately identifies and incorporates the machinations of others into her personal goals.
But the inescapable baggage of the source material and the whole high concept revolving around mental illness and medical abuse does tend to bog it down.
I do hope to see Sarah Paulson get more leading roles and more chances to play queer women alongside other queer women.
I guess the question at the end of the day is "Who was this for?" I don't think anyone was clamoring for Nurse Ratched to get the Maleficent/Joker treatment. I think this is More Ryan Murphy for the sake of More Ryan Murphy. You want more Sarah Paulson and American Horror Story?
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The day I learned about "shots", as a small child... I don't know how old I was, except pre-K. I couldn't contextualize it except that one of my friends was going to the doctor to "get shot".
When it was rephrased that he was going to get "his shots", I started to imagine that at the doctor's office they had like a wall of cabinets with little compartments that had people's names on them, which had like guns or ammo in them.
The clarification that it was "a needle" just made me picture something like a nail gun. Like, they shoot a needle into your arm? And if not, why was it called a "shot"? They needed somebody better at naming things to straighten this out.
The Shirley Exception: Surely, there must be reasonable exceptions! Can we write those exceptions into law? No, because people will take advantage. But surely nobody would just let someone die!
The original Shirley Exception thread, which goes deeper into the concept.
The belief in a Shirley Exception is crucial to the self-image of most conservative voters, as is the belief that people will take advantage, if rights are spelled out.
The fear that someone, somewhere will take advantage and get something they don't need/deserve is the only "moral hazard" that really matters in US politics.
I think my favorite Dimension 20 sidequest might be... all of them. I honestly can't choose. They are each such different creatures.
I think there's really something to be said for the character design that goes into them.
The sidequest seasons are short, self-contained stories with characters who already have some levels in them (the first one was explicitly an epic level cmapaign) and history and characterization.
And obviously any RPG character is going to evolve through play but when you're planning on what amounts to an extended one-shot and you're doing it for an audience, I think that inspires the players to really go to the next level in bringing a fully-realized person to the stage.
So if you're not sure if an image you see going around with captions on it is real, the first thing to do is check if the video exists. These days a static screen shot of a current event won't exist if the video isn't around.
Honestly, if your first reaction to something is a feeling of "This can't be real." or "Someone please tell me this is fake."... be the someone. I mean, assuming everything fake is obnoxious and equally gullible in its own way. But check.
You should never be spreading something around with a comment like "Hope this is fake" or "This has to be fake. Doesn't it?" If you're already suspicious, check it out.
I want @billgreensmaine to know I just sent the Maine Democrats a very strongly worded donation to let them know that I am deeply concerned with their tactics.
Susan Collins is a GOP Senator who has tried to maintain an illusory distance from Trump by voicing nebulous "concerns" over the past four years, while consistently voting a party line. The Democrats apparently put up these signs to tie them together.