Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on "Overly Sarcastic Productions" channel.

  1. "Luckily, the Internet is purpose-built for shouting into the void" So true!
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  2. "Cleansing armaggeddon" is also a part of the Greek mythologies. They even have a word for it, "Ekpyrosis", which means "the cleansing fires of heaven" and it rolls around every 10,000 years or so to wipe out the corruption of life. I REALLY want to see some space opera with a starship named "Ekpyrosis".
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  3. "But perhaps the greatest monster of all… is man." Or at least their Internet avatars.
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  4. China: "You think you're in a time of social unrest? Come back when you've stacked up at least 10 million dead bodies, and we'll talk."
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  5. The people that James sent to Ireland to "colonize" were the border reavers, who frequently made their living raiding across the border between Scotland and England. (The Scottish king James) shipped them off to Ireland so whatever trouble they habitually caused, wouldn't be trouble for a newly united Britain.
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  6. Werewolves are perfect for exploring the fact that human beings get angry (and even dangerous), and this anger and danger is considered animalistic. You wouldn't expect a werewolf to show up in a proper Brave New World, for instance -- or if you did, the story would specifically explore how that inherent danger was domesticated.
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  7. Douglas Adams, in "Life, the Universe, and Everything": “The alien ship was already thundering towards the upper reaches of the atmosphere, on its way out into the appalling void which separates the very few things there are in the Universe from each other. Its occupant, the alien with the expensive complexion, leaned back in its single seat. His name was Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged. He was a man with a purpose. Not a very good purpose, as he would have been the first to admit, but it was at least a purpose and it did at least keep him on the move. Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged was --- indeed, is --- one of the Universe's very small number of immortal beings. Those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had had his immortality thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch and a pair of rubber bands. The precise details of the accident are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. Wowbagger closed his eyes in a grim and weary expression, put some light jazz on the ship's stereo, and reflected that he could have made it if it hadn't been for Sunday afternoons, he really could have done. To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally outliving the hell out of everybody. In the end, it was the Sunday afternoons he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at about 2:55, when you know that you've had all the baths you can usefully have that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the papers you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul. So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people's funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everyone in it in particular. This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing which would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this. He would insult the Universe.”
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  8.  @hermeticbear  Where did the Minotaur get its carnivorous nature from, if not from its human side?
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  9. Equality? The Japanese assumed they were superior, not equal.
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  10. "But back in India, it just looked like some domineering colonizers came to take the shiny stuff and stomp on the rest" This describes the Alexander, the Mughals, and in fact the actions of many internal princely states against other princely states, does it not? Britain's only unique here because she was uniquely good at this stuff.
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  11. "Culminated somewhat tragically in the handover of Hong Kong" Oh, NOW you start complaining!
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  12. You can get some mileage out of whether a character sees themselves as who they are in downtime, or who they are in plot-time. Maybe they like who they are in downtime better. Maybe they're absolutely terrified of what happened during plot time, and don't really want to go back. Fun stuff.
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  13.  @ethnichellenismincaliforni8215  No good deed goes unpunished, eh? Socrates was eventually executed for "corrupting the youth", and if they considered Alcibiades one of those youth, they kinda had a point.
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  14.  @zoro115-s6b  Yeah, when the old guy in Captain America said that only people who had been weak could be trusted with power because they could empathize with the victims, my response was "You sure about that?"
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  15. Throughout the 30's and 40's, Imperial Japan showed what it was like when it got to behave as it preferred to do. It's not unreasonable for the United States to ignore some of Japan's preferences, at that point.
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  16. Yeah, the villain is something in your heart that makes you want to see only the bad in everything. In other words, Critical Theory.
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  17. Claudius literally does this in the prayer scene in Shakespeare's play "Hamlet". Spoiler: He decides to keep being evil.
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  18. I'm curious, how much of the EIC's trajectory was due to its managerial and executive hiring pool ALL being brought up studying Caesar's "Gallic Wars"?
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  19. Same reason Joker gets so many backstories -- Dragons are representations of primordial chaos. Joker's only evil because Batman would look like a jerk if he punched "The (Wise) Fool" in the face so much.
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  20. Yes, but the names of small English towns are hilarious because so many are just mispronounced Scandinavian words.
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  21. Dude, how can you include Malleus Maleficarum without referencing the Monty Python skit about the logic it uses to determine guilt? Seriously, we don't mind if these videos are several hours long. =)
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  22. More Journey to the West videos!
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  23. "Wanna know how I got these [scars / Merry Men]?" You just aren't supposed to nail down chaotic heroes or villains. By the way, could you compare the Robin Hood stories to the Outlaws of the Marsh stories out of China?
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  24. To nail down the Christmas-in-December thing, you can track your way through two pregnancies and a Jewish liturgical calendar. Zechariah (a Jewish priest in ~1 BC) didn't believe his wife Elizabeth could get pregnant at their age. He was wrong about this in a way that irritated God, and was stricken dumb. This rendered him unable to perform the priestly duties of his specific order at that specific time of year. Elizabeth, hearing about her cousin Mary (yes, that Mary) getting pregnant as well, visits with her while she's a ways along, and baby John does some pre-natal gymnastics upon coming close to the One whose sandals he was unworthy to untie. The Bible has a some specific details about the time hacks involved there, but when you work it all out, it puts Mary due in December.
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  25. No, like a normal college education that includes Critical Theory.
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  26. The coal and steel community wasn't just to "aid in rebuilding", it was to try to prevent another war. The iron- and coal-rich territories on the Franco-German border were a source of conflict since at least Louis the XIV. The theory was that if people with money could buy iron / coal / steel tariff-free from these places no matter what language they spoke, they wouldn't be motivated to go to war over them anymore.
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  27. So, was The Iliad a piece of propaganda designed to unite the Greeks one more against a threat from the East?
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  28. Anthony Hopkins is American. He was naturalized several years ago. Which earned him the nickname, "Lechter the Defector", from the disappointed native countrymen.
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  29. The simple solution to the humanity-faith-destroying nature of this fictional story about what would happen if you dropped a bunch of British schoolboys onto an island in the South Pacific, is to read the non-fiction account about what actually happened when they dropped a bunch of British petty criminals onto an island in the South Pacific, called "Australia". It involves Captain Bligh (yes, same one from the Bounty) getting locked in a closet because he tried depriving Aussies of their booze. Funny by anyone's standards. :)
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  30. Why is a super losing his powers a "gutpunch"? Probably because it connects to our fears of getting old, and dying.
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  31.  @forickgrimaldus8301  If he's Greek, why in the world is he so soft on Islam in general and the Ottomans in particular?
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  32.  @ckl9390  "Deimos" and "Phobos" would work too. =) Although you might get morale issues in the people serving aboard. "Hans... are we the baddies?"
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  33.  @jakarnilson  Yeah, Blue's not particularly evenhanded here.
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  34.  @theDENIMMAN  That was probably a French name, that got the same treatment. Although who knows, it may have been a faithful translation of the original French.
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  35. "Peripatetic" got into English from Greek, with the meaning "wandering from place to place for short periods". It's probably useful to see "peripateia" in those terms.
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  36. Aaaaand you leave out the exploits of the Chindits in ensuring Indian independence from the Imperial Japanese. Again, I refer you to the "Raid" of Nanking, this time as evidence of what the English were protecting India from.
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  37.  @Taurus388  Without British technology and political organization, do you really think what happened to China would not have happened to India?
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  38. Is there an English-language collection of the notes of the Japanese envoys (explorers, really) or the discussions the Japanese leadership had when these explorers got back, to decide which Western practices to appropriate? That would be fascinating reading, I think.
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  39. But they've got this revisionist version out now.
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  40. "People draw inspiration from other stories instead of from people they know in real life" When Mark Hamill was unsure how to play Luke, he just based his acting on an impression of George Lucas. Word is, Rey was not so much an author-insert as a producer-insert -- she was Kathleen Kennedy's avatar, and she was to have no flaws whatsoever.
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  41. "But perhaps the greatest monster of all… is man." Or at least their Internet avatars.
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  42. Sorry Blue, you didn't include anything to top the most epic Indian historian quote on YouTube: India: "If you don't leave I'm going to starve myself." Britain: "OK, we'll leave." India: "Omg, that worked?"
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  43. Kasumi dies??? So Ranma goes really dark at some point?
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  44.  @notenough1484  Some rolls need to be reversed. Blue's even in on the "distorting the narrative" thing.
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  45. 3:57 - Strictly speaking, the Chi and Rho symbols put together also mean, "It's Time", giving the brand a fortuitous double meaning.
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  46. One thing about these old gods (stories generally, for that matter), is they're a network of resonant intuitions. A storyteller has an idea that came from who-knows-what intuitive connections, and the audience says, "Yeah, that sounds about right." The ones that sound the "rightest" (presumably having the most in common with how the world seemed to work to most people), and the stories people are most curious about or eager to hear (maybe dealing with problems that they still haven't figured out the best way to deal with), end up being told often enough and similarly enough, to be made "canon". If something like the "true" story of a chaos god is incoherent, well, maybe it's just incoherent, because it grabs a patch from here and a patch from there as different aspects of an idea are explored. Imagine the parable of Plato's Cave, where the thing that's casting the shadows on the wall is in itself a mosaic of a multitude of shadows, in an infinite regress.
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  47. Defensively yoinking the entire world? Sounds like the British Empire.
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  48. Big Tech censors: Hold My Beer.
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  49. Raiders of the Lost Ark from Belloq's point of view, is a tragedy. Indiana Jones is really just an Ishmael or Horatio character, there bear witness to the story.
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  50. Can you revisit this one as an allegory for the evolution of Enlightenment Classicism into Romanticism? Pretty sure that works.
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  51. Has Red seriously never watched The Empire Strikes back? The hostage-friend thing is the turning point of the whole film.
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  52. Batman and Joker aren't the same. They aren't even opposites. The Joker is chaos. Order is... Commissioner Gordon. And Batman is the dynamic force that mediates between them.
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  53. I'd recommend Connie Willis' books dealing with time travel -- "To Say Nothing of the Dog" is really, really funny; "Blackout" and "All Clear" commemorate the Blitz in a very powerful way. I still haven't picked up "Domesday Book" but will get around to that eventually.
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  54. Red, these are FICTIONAL CHARACTERS. You don't have to be disturbed by the unsavory tales attributed to them. They're no more "true" than the most cringe-inducing Harry Potter slashfic.
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  55. Protests don't appear in a vacuum. They required an economic shutdown that shoved tens of millions of people out of work, destroying their hopes and dreams, and denying them daily constructive purpose that allows them to support themselves and their families with dignity. The idea that an evil that claimed the lives of 10 people last year is a larger cause than an evil that has thrown tens of millions into existential turmoil, is propaganda spread by actors who expect their political power to be enhanced by that narrative, the actual problems of the country or any of the people in in be d*mned, and the useful idiots who get swept up in the story-of-the-week without looking out at what is happening in the world and thinking it through. Blue, I don't know if you really are better than this, but you should be. We deserve better, from someone attempting to educate the public about history.
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  56. Accents can give a work some exotic charm, when you're being pushed a little bit outside your linguistic comfort zone. Howard Pyle's "The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood" is a work I enjoyed for this reason. The nautical jargon of O'Brien's Aubrey and Maturin series was fun too.
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  57. Merry Christmas, everybody! =)
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  58. Scotland had the last laugh though, as the United Kingdom was united under the Stuart monarchy. Huh, didn't know Henry VII was Welsh. Are you sure England conquered these other kingdoms, and not the other way around?
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  59. So, remind me again why Malvolio's treatment in Twelfth Night is funny, but Katherine's can't possibly be? In each case, their crime is being a killjoy.
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  60. An immortal might still be as pain-averse as anyone, keeping the stakes in a fight something you could identify with.
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  61. "Archetypes are a lazy way to create characters" -- Eh, not really. The fewer dimensions a character has, they're less a character study (because the story is exploring that particular character) than they are a tool for the author to explore something else through. Ivan's strongly-drawn atheistic intellectualism and Dmitri's strongly-drawn material pleasure-seeking could be considered one-dimensional if you look at them in isolation, but when you combine them with Alyosha's spiritualism and seeking nature, they become a way to externalize Dostoevsky's internal debates about the nature of religion and faith. Is an animator going to stop using the x-axis because it's one-dimensional, or is that animator going to use the x, y, and z axes, to make all his creations come to life and explore vast worlds?
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  62. Space is horrifying because it makes us very, very helpless, and will do so very, very quickly if we don't have our technology with us and in good working order.
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  63. Hold on, San Francisco has its own dialect? Really?
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  64. (Duplicate comment for some reason)
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  65. "I will not turn into a snake. It never helps." - The Top 100 Things I'd do if I were an Evil Overlord, #34.
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  66. Somehow in Avatar: The Last Airbender, they make critter-mashing cute instead of scary.
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  67. So has the parting of the Iron Curtain given us any more information about the Silk Road? Any digs opened up in the vicinity of old Samarkand?
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  68. It's worth noting that the "Common Coal and Steel Community" started on the resource theory of war -- Germany and France were mostly fighting over the coal and iron rich regions right along their border. Giving everyone (who could pay for it) access to those resources was one of the major innovations of decolonization. Empires were founded to assure access to resources, and if those resources were available on a free market, well, empire (and war) just wasn't as necessary. Capitalism leads to peace, sometimes.
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  69.  @alexemy2463  "Already wealthy"? Europe was anything but that, at the beginning of the colonial era. More technologically advanced, sure, more capable of organizing effective people across the globe, sure, but not wealthy. The whole reason India and China (and parts of Africa and the Americas) were attractive to European adventurers is specifically because those regions were wealthier than Europe. Of course, that changed quickly because of that technological edge. It's worth noting that the countries that got the richest (notably Spain) were actually hamstrung in the long-term great power competition by a lack of attention to capitalism and technology. When other parts of the world (Japan in the mid-19th century, China in the late 20th-early 21st) changed their entire societies to follow the Western model -- science / technology, plus market capitalism, if a very authoritarian form -- that those parts of the world started to be able to deliver a Western standard of living to their people. The rising authoritarian / militaristic power of Japan had to be stopped by force, which (along with their subsequent integration into a constructive global system that benefits them as well as everyone else) are more lessons we need to keep in mind.
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  70.  @alexemy2463  ? The already-wealthy classes within English society (and many others) were the landowning class, whose property declined in value as competition from colonial agricultural goods. If anything, colonial expansion provided a means of social mobility for an up and coming business class. The production "Hamilton" does a pretty good job of getting across how this happened for the settlers, and novels like Vanity Fair give a good idea of how this happened on the European side of the Atlantic.
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  71.  @alexemy2463  As far a the Spanish story goes, the conquistadors were typically of a knightly class, but completely impoverished, which is why they tried their luck in the New World.
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  72. You miss the part where "dhimmi" are second-class citizens, subject to taxes, discrimination, etc. You wouldn't want to be one yourself.
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  73. "Since superheroes started existing, there have been more supervillains" So, drawing a connection between the Patriot Act and the brouhaha we're making of the day after January 5?
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  74. The problem with depression is, it's tough to tell the difference between a "darkest hour" someone can pull themselves out of (made dark by your brain not producing enough of the right neurotransmitters in the right amounts) and that same condition caused by illness. Get the diagnosis wrong, and you've either not given the medically depressed person proper treatment which means their depression will not go away, OR you've just given drugs to someone whose life really is just screwed up. A decent rule of thumb is always work the "life is screwed up" angle, and if that doesn't work (or you can run some actual objective diagnostic tests) go for the drugs.
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  75. Communism's authoritarianism has never been avoided. Stalin wasn't an outlier.
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  76.  @lexingtonbrython1897  You know what happened to the POUM at the hands of the Stalinists, don't you? Didn't end well for Zapata either, iirc.
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  77. You didn't include the pre-WW2 map of Germany when you talked about how it was partitioned.
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  78. The Persian justice system was highly elitist, as was their entire bureaucratic system. Persia is beloved of urbanists who believe that common people should be obedient to their betters -- the "best" people should rule unquestioned by the rabble. The Greeks disagreed. This is why we count our descent from the Greeks, and should be thankful for it.
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  79. Wow, you resisted the temptation to make a pun on "Norman Keeps". I'm impressed.
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  80. Come on Red, boys really ARE vampire werewolves, and girls really ARE succubus banshees. At least they are because you're a teenager who doesn't really know what the world actually is like yet, so why not? That's what they seem like.
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  81. Spain and Portugal didn't "swiftly" lose anything, it look a looooong time for their empires to go kaput. Not a long time by the standards of Asia Minor, but still a long time.
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  82. Was Rey ever annoyingly whiny? Did her Obi-Wan equivalent have to fish her out of lethal trouble ... twice? (RIP Max von Sydow. You deserved so much better.) Did she ever get tagged in the rear end by a mini-blaster shot from of a drone? In short, did the story treat her with anything other than kid gloves?
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  83. By the way, Scrooge McDuck has a Scots accent because Scots are supposed to be cheap. Don't tell Disney though, they might cancel him because that's racist or something. =(
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  84. The "Hawaiian League" consisted of the immigrants who found themselves the majority? Interesting to hear that you think this gives them less political legitimacy.
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  85. "Most of the time wolves are not dangerous to humans." The rest of the time, they will tear humans apart, especially enjoying the sport of carrying off preschoolers. Yeah, there's a world of difference between "most of the time" and "never".
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  86. So Zeus was trying to cheer up / distract Demeter, and didn't think to try getting one of the other goddesses to perform a striptease? You'd think Zeus, of all people, would come up with this one. Seems like the Japanese gods are much more creative that way.
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  87.  @bluerosevideos4164  It would fit with Zeus' typical levels of empathy, for him to get someone else a gift he liked better than they did.
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  88. Isn't Medea's "chariot of Helios" the original Deus Ex Machina?
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  89. The fact that no culture who built ziggurats survives to this day, proves one thing: Ziggurats are hazardous to your health.
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  90. A woman whose desk is covered in pictures of her family AND STILL DECIDES TO WRECK HER FAMILY is only connected to her family on the shallowest possible level.
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  91. Is Tripitaka a MacGuffin? Or is the allegorical point of the story that Buddhist wisdom is not only useful, but exactly what Sun Wukong (and the rest of the externalized Self that the crew represents) needs in any given situation?
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  92. Guido? His name was GUIDO Fawkes??
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  93. Mentors die so much because human life is multi-generational. One generation gains wisdom with age, and another rises in an ever-replenishing fountain of enthusiasm, ignorance, and yes, potential. In many cases the whole point of stories is to show how aged wisdom combines with youthful energy (in a realistic way), not just because a mentor / student trope is the best way to bring that across, but also because older people die in the real world, and passing on that wisdom before that happens is just a much of a problem to be explored as anything else that might happen in a story. So, aged wisdom dies, not to dismiss that wisdom, but to reflect the fact that that's the way it goes in life. Also, love interests die because up until modern medicine, childbirth was incredibly dangerous and stories are a way to explore ways to deal with this.
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  94. A Dragon is just a chimera with a better graphic designer.
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  95. Vengeance has a deterrent quality to it. If you want to maximize evil in this world, allow everyone who acts in an evil way, to get away with it.
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  96.  @purplehello98  Yep. It's therapeutic.
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  97. Only, many of us didn't. The third one, anyway.
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  98. Be honest Blue, if locking her up in a convent was the price of getting a history like this, you'd have coshed her and carried her off in a sack yourself.
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  99. Mmmmmmm.... eggy sourdough pancake .... mmmmm ... soaked in berbere-spiced drippings .... mmmmmm!
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  100. Odysseus was known as the best bowman since Hercules, interestingly. Note the strength required to string and draw a bow.
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  101. So, there are a lot of Lefties on here. Has anyone had an "Are we the baddies" moment after reading the actual text of Florida's Parental Rights in Education bill, and realizing that it's a case of "Just what it says on the tin" which prevents schoolteachers (including straight ones) from secretly grooming their children?
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  102. The canonical modern Western revenge story is the Count of Monte Cristo, where the title character is wronged by villains A, B, and C. Dumas made the Count heroic and not simply selfish, by pairing him up victims X, Y, and Z, who villains A, B, and C had also wronged subsequent to the wrong that they did to the Count -- demonstrating both the villains' villainous character, and giving the Count's revenge a dimension of magnanimity. Interestingly, Shakespeare twists and turns the idea of a revenge story -- Othello is absolutely wrong to seek revenge, Romeo's vengefulness (and the vengefulness of the two families generally) causes the whole problem of the play, Hamlet is wracked with doubts, non-vengeful Brutus is noble while vengeful Cassius is petty (and the reprisals from Pompey onwards crash the Republic), and Titus Andronicus is basically a monster. About the only time vengeance is seen as laudable, is when it's against a main character -- MacBeth's end is seen as morally justified, On the lighter side, Prospero is arguably a good guy because his "revenge" plot is generally just toying with his enemies, with an eye to a happy ending. Oberon and Titania's feud is a prank war played up for laughs.
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  103. If you want to get madly, truly, deeply cynical about "proxy wars", just look at them as live-fire USA and USSR weapon system testing between willing participants who hated each other anyway.
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  104. The Red "Scare" was a response to real, legitimate infiltration of our government and institutions by paid foreign agents dedicated to the overthrow of America. Call it an imperfect reaction if you like, but the problem it was reacting to was real. (Probably real today, too.)
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  105.  @merrittanimation7721  Nonsense. Evidence has since come out of KGB archives confirming most of the famous cases, along with a whole slew of others.
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  106. The deal here is you're picking the term "strong" as the character trait. Strength is cognitively linked to physical strength, and men are typically physically stronger than women. I would think the solution would be, to pick a descriptor rather than "strong" if you want to have a positive trait that maps to women as often as men. "Smart", "Wise", "Witty", "Charming" - these all have their own associations, but they're more gender-balanced than (perhaps physical) strength. As far as why there are so many straight white males as characters out there... - The vast, vast majority of people are straight. - About half of people are male. - Chances are if you're writing in English, you're white. - If someone is writing what they know, chances aren't quite fifty-fifty they're going to pick a white, straight man, but they'll be much, much higher to be that than any given specific intersection you could imagine. So..... Yeah.
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  107. Bethesda does something rather curious with the "giant space rock genre". An apotheotic dark elf named Vivek slowed down time around the city-block-sized space rock to prevent it from hitting his city. His supporters promptly turned it into another neighborhood just floating there for anyone with sufficient magic power to jump or levitate up to. Vivek an extremely chill sort of floaty meditative demigod, coming across a bit like Ang's older brother.
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  108. Scholastic. Not "skoliast".
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  109. This is known colloquially as "Getting red-pilled". =)
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  110. The Continental way to look at The Seven Year's War was pretty much between Prussia and everybody (except England a little bit.)
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  111.  @tobistein6639  You've never heard of canine leg-humping? Human sexual practices are pretty consistent across civilizations. Perversions can vary pretty widely, though.
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  112. So how does he compare to Socrates?
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  113. Ahem. Japan was so closed off, they refused to sign standard international treaties allowing for the repatriation of shipwrecked sailors. Naval lore was (and it was correct), if you wrecked off Japan, you never saw home again even if you survived. This made the navy saltier than usual in their insistence to open Japan up.
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  114. Honestly, the whole "friend who would die for you, and actually everyone" is the perfect friend thing, is pretty much why Jesus is so popular, and always will be.
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  115. You missed the part where the king that oversaw the First Partion of Poland was a Russian agent -- literally a man Catherine the Great was sleeping with. (When her horse was out of town, one supposes.)
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  116.  @yep1486  You have a comfort zone? Lucky you.
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  117. Hi, Red, this is Christianity. You know how there are some people who are atheists? (They don't believe in Allah, Zeus, Odin, Horus, Vishnu, and the rest? I get the idea you're one of them, by the way.) Well, we're a lot like that, except there's one God we DO believe in (atheists but for one god less, as it were), and we think that there's probably some naturalistic explanation for the rest of them, mainly that they might be garbled stories of historical figures from pre-literate societies. (As opposed to, say, the extensive written records we have starting with Greco-Roman times that exist in a reasonably intact chain up through the last two thousand years. Thanks to the medieval Irish, among enough other independent groups that (for example) we have a wealth of evidence that Julius Caesar was assassinated, and even MORE evidence that Christ was crucified, etc.) Anyway, sure, there are references to demons and such in stories like the Prose Edda, but those are probably a gloss / hybrid / bastardization of the aforementioned garbled stories of pre-literate history, with some Jungian archetypes mixed in because that seems to be just what humans DO when we write stories that last for centuries. So, yeah. And also, sorry not sorry, we burned the stories of jaguar-raining snake demons who demanded human sacrifice because these are CLEARLY so demonic that they made a violent psychopath like Hernan Cortez look like the GOOD guy, replacing the old ghastly collection of feathers and fangs with God who sacrifices *Himself*. I can only imagine ancient South Americans, seeing a crucifix for the first time, and asking, "So is that how you sacrifice people to your gods?" and a priest replying, "No, that's God, who sacrificed Himself for us, so that he suffers instead", to which the South American replies, "I'm intrigued by this new theology, and would like to hear more." So again, yeah.
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  118. DO NOT LISTEN to Red when she tells you not to watch her Shakespeare Tragedy videos. They're absolutely hilarious, extremely educational, and if you were looking for production quality in videos, you would not be watching YouTube in the first place.
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  119. I have no idea what the best way to make requests, but -- since you've done both Journey to the West and Robin Hood, could you do Bandits of the Marsh as well?
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  120. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, with the Three Heroes, Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei.
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  121. He also seems to be afraid of history that doesn't spend most of its time dumping on Europeans, Christians, Americans, etc etc etc.
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  122.  @pearchris  You're not presenting a very good picture of Blue's fans (or Europe's critics) if you can't distinguish between the last two thousand years and the last 500. The fact that you seem to think the dumping that Europe did on the rest of the world is somehow unique in the regions of the world (in anything other than its success) also shows that Blue is not doing right by his defenders, in teaching them history.
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  123. Theseus is still a hero because he killed Procrustes, an early object lesson in the atrocity that is "equality of outcome".
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  124. Be respectful -- Dostoevsky (a Christian with a weakness for adultery) got away with including Jesus as the main character in a meditation on polyamory, and it's considered one of the greatest novels of all time. By the way, being respectful in this case (and in most others) involves *agreeing with Jesus*.
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  125.  @nikajika4635  There's a multitude of "broken men", each with his own story. A few of them are profound, most of them are just dismal. The reason Joker and Batman have achieved the place in our legends they have, is they're archetypes. Tropes, if you prefer. =)
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  126.  @nikajika4635  Joker moves on all the time. He's so moved on from whatever situation made him the way he is, that it's not clear (or even all that important) what that situation even was. He's chaos, without a past, destroying institutions and causing pain just because he feels like it, always moving on from one episode to another. He constantly causes trouble, with a new scheme or gang all the time which he abandons or betrays for the least of his selfish whims, or for no reason whatever. Hey, at least he's "true to himself", right? Has Batman moved on, at all? Isn't his primary motivation to make sure no one else suffers what he suffered? He has at least one foot firmly planted in the past. He's obsessed enough with that past to dress up like a bat for a hobby and devote his life to Gotham's crime problem. No... "moving on" is so far from the lesson of that story, I have to wonder where you pulled that in from. Could you clarify that? Something preoccupying you from personal experience, maybe? I'm not sure "rebuilding" is a theme either. Batman is doing his best to keep the chaos at bay, but there isn't really anything in those stories to point to Batman (or Bruce Wayne, who certainly has the resources) rebuilding anything. Could you also clarify where you got that from? The scars and the tragedy run deep. What Bruce Wayne could have been, what he could have built, if the foundation of his family hadn't been senselessly shattered, isn't even addressed. A hilarious aside... when Val Kilmer's Batman hooked up with a psychiatrist, audiences hated it. I figure if she looks like Nicole Kidman they should give him a break, but audiences know what does and doesn't resonate, in a story. Seeing a shrink won't work, for Batman. Returning Gotham into the sort of smoothly-functioning city that old Commissioner Gordon represents, finally undoing Joker and the rest of the Rogue's Gallery, returning Justice and Order, is how that story is supposed to wrap up. At least, if Batman gets a happy ending. There isn't much in the way of setup, for that kind of payoff. I'm not sure it's that kind of story.
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  127. 8:32 If it were a guy presenting this point, the only proper counterpoint would be, "Shut up, Wesley."
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  128. Anyone else get the creeping suspicion that 2020 is NOT the time to be poking fun at the war god because you figure he's locked in a jar?
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  129. The Iliad, dangerous for women? Considering what happened to Helen, Iphigenia, Briseis, Cassandra and the rest, wouldn't you agree?
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  130. Considering what the Bolsheviks did in Russia (bloody totalitarian revolution), and what they were doing in countries throughout the globe (same thing), the Red Scare is not all that unreasonable a reaction. Honestly, we probably need another one, considering what China has been up to recently.
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  131. How many stories follow a kid who doesn't pass the test to get in, and gets a better education being an outsider (aka "real person") doing actual work in and around the school?
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  132. To be fair, they were like that when they got there.
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  133. The Greek stuff that was c**p, didn't survive 2500 years. Go figure.
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  134. Wow, you just can't admit that it's Christianity that cured the blood feud system, not Babylon. Go read The Saga of Burned Njall again.
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  135. 1:12 - So, "Nun", as in "Joshua, son of Nun"? Make of that what you will.
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  136. So that mirror is basically Critical Theory.
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  137. Britannia set on top of the rest of the world because they figured out a better way of doing things than the rest of the world. The rest of the world has been catching up, and living better lives for it.
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  138. Look at the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, as well. Abraham doesn't just bother G-d three times about saving the city; he bothers Him five or six times, and this emphasizes how much he's sticking his neck out.
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  139. When Revolutionary Communism is literally trying to take over the world by force, it's not all that academic. Blue, are you deliberately being deceptive, or are you the one deceived?
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  140. The whole point of character-focused stories is to show how a character can overcome a situation. Situation-focused stories are a different animal entirely, showing how different people react to the situation (frequently not surviving) and they are a completely different type of story. In some stories, ranging from sitcoms to dystopias, it is the situation itself that has "plot armor".
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  141. So I have to know, is the Rossi apartment STILL rent-controlled?
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  142. Well, you could use immortality stories as ways to explore the types of pain people can feel and carry with them. If you're worried about whether there are stakes, make that the thing you're specifically addressing. Honestly, if there's enough content for an intellectual investigation of something, there's enough content for a story. :)
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  143. Graham Chapman: There's just no pleasing some people.
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  144. Who cares if pineapples aren't native to Hawai'i? Hawaiians have no problem assimilating things from other cultures and being really chill about it. You should do the same. =) Aloha!
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  145. OK, so you call it an "oops" to decentralize the government, but then talk about what sounds like a golden age when you do. Blue, you're a tyrant at heart. I'm glad you have no real power, but I worry about anyone who listens to you without being aware of your predilection for overbearing government.
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  146. "Space is eerily silent" We should go there and have children, to liven the place up. =)
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  147. Blame Proust.
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  148. Mary Sue doesn't have to work at anything. No hero's journey at all. (That's why Rey catches so much flak, by the way. Rey's powers are properly Hero's Journey powers, not Mary Sue powers.) But this doesn't explain why the trope is gendered, or even why it's a trope in the first place. Let's play with the trope a little bit and see what variants of it are more palatable to the parts of the Internet (sadly, aka Humanity) that do not accept Rey as a valid story element. Instead of a special miraculous ability to (as a complete newb) out-swordfight a veteran swordsman with a clearly overwhelming advantage in weight, reach, and upper-body strength, let's make it a life-giving ability. Healing or something. A healing ability that she can do without any practice, no consultation with wisdom, etc. The complaints would subside, and no one would bat an eye. Could we add, maybe, a tendency to get damselled on a semi-regular basis, particularly when using this miraculous ability? Sure. Maybe even show that she runs the risk of serious injury or death by using this ability (but she heroically does it anyway, because LOVE). Some people might call this "more balanced", but they'd honestly be missing the point. And, what if in addition to not having to work for this miraculous ability, she doesn't even want it? The trope still holds. Bonus points if (in more modern stories) she complains that it's the only focus of her life and she wants something more than that. Oh, extra super bonus points if this miraculous ability first manifested when she was a teen. Now let's come back around to the idea that everyone loves Mary Sue for her miraculous abilities. Everyone makes a fuss over her for them. Her biggest problem is life is deciding what hunky guy is going to get the opportunity to make the biggest fuss. Does it still work with the trope? You bet. But why oh why is it gendered? Is this somehow a valid exploration of an actual aspect of the human experience that women undergo and men do not? (Let me know when the penny dropped for you.) By the way, for powers like beating people up or otherwise imposing beneficial order on the external chaotic world, you really should have a Hero's Journey to accompany the development of those powers, because that's how the world *is*. Rey would have been a LOT more accepted if she had done so.
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  149. So if a government's harsh actions are to be condemned, why aren't a mob's harsh actions to be condemned?
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  150. 2:17 -- For a better cover letter for a job application, see Bach's Brandenburg Concertos.
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  151. Is it even possible for Hollywood to write a good / realistic parent?
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  152. John Cleese, sort of: "What have the British ever done for us?" Michael Palin, etc: "sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the British ever done for us?" Blue: "Irresponsibly left their Empire" Graham Chapman: "There's just no pleasing some people." Monty Python's Life of Brian: Even more subversive, iconoclastic, and heretical to the current crop of self-righteous moralists, than it was when it was first filmed!
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  153.  @TathD  Lol, you had me until you pulled the "racist" thing. It's the new Godwin's Law.
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  154.  Hans Hanzo  No, not really. You might want to reconsider your "Anglos bad, therefore everyone else good" knee-jerk reactions. Stereotyping like that might feel good emotionally, but it doesn't really add to the debate.
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  155. Um, Blue, you're including the India Mutiny leaving out the massive crimes against humanity (amounting to genocide) that the Sepoys conducted against English civilians during the period. The atrocities against the British there are comparable to the Japanese atrocities against the Chinese during the "Raid" of Nanking during World War II.
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  156. So, why is it that Red isn't curious about how the protagonist wins? How you achieve victory, if it isn't clear from the outset, is as interesting a story as whether you achieve victory - and arguably more useful. After all, tragedies are about how you fail, and that's a useful thing to explore.
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  157. "The cat goes 'I'll take care of this' and goes to the mayor to demand why people can't afford food" Yeah, that's a cat's solution -- "I want to talk to your manager". Hint: Karen the Crazy Catlady is not going to have the broad appeal the author suspects, unless she's going to pay for movie tickets for all her 142 cats.
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  158. Yowl, O Muse, the comfiness of blankets! For later time, the glory that was Greece, We see anon the grandeur that was Rome, But now is time for nap, the Muse is spent. (Have you mentioned yet that Cleo is the Muse of History? The name means "glory".)
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  159. The Triangle Trade was not interesting to most pirates. What was interesting to most pirates was the flow of silver from the Spanish colonies (which was what a lot of the Europeans were fighting over, with the Spanish Succession, and it affected European history well through the 30 Years' War). This silver flow ended up in China, where it paid for tea and porcelain (among other things). Along the way it made several places very rich, from Genoa through Cairo, through the Indian subcontinent, rounding Southeast Asia (where it prompted a coastward migration that collapsed Angkor Wat), and finally to China itself. That silver flow rates its own episode, I'd think.
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  160. You just don't want to say much about Columbus because you don't want to be humiliated by Knowing Better, or any other YouTuber capable of actual research. But then, why not just be honest with everyone, and say Columbus is one of the most lied-about figures of the 15th century?
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  161. OK Red, why is "Flash Point" more famous than "The City on the Edge of Forever"?
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  162. "We can be better than them now" Except we're probably not, in our own special ways. Solid observation about historical favorites having both "DO's" and "DON'Ts", though. Treasure both the opportunity to learn from the glories of others, and the opportunity to learn from their mistakes.
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  163. Historians: Wait, that worked?
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  164.  ਅਰਜਨ ਸਿੰਘ  Yeah, um, you're probably not going to gain a whole lot of sympathy for Bose. The Axis powers are pretty close to the living embodiment of evil for the modern West, and his cooperation with them seals his historical fate. Look at what happened to Wernher von Braun's legacy -- he's still dragged through the mud, despite being instrumental in putting Man on the Moon. Bose might be able to be rehabilitated, but it will probably take a couple of centuries.
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  165.  ਅਰਜਨ ਸਿੰਘ  Yeah, it's a bit like the Finns allying with Germany against the USSR for their independence -- you can see why they did it, but it was still deeply questionable. And honestly, allying with the Imperial Japanese probably would have gone badly for India, had the Imperial Japanese won. Their record on indigenous relations in places like the Philippines was not great. By the way, it's hard to see (from the story that's gotten all the way to the US books and universities that I learned from) that there was any realistic alternative to the Hindu / Muslim partition that you criticize Gandhi for. How would you have seen that work out in a more positive, constructive way?
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  166. Question for the weebs: What is the honorific "-dono", like Kenshin calls Kaoru? Where does that fit in the -sama / -san / -kun / -chan hierarchy?
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  167. If the protagonist of the story wants to find Kay, it's perfectly fair to say that the Snow Queen was the one that complicated that.
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  168.  @dracorex426  He doesn't seem to exhibit much initiative here. He could be replaced with a plushie, and the story would go more or less as it did.
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  169. How do you get through a video on accents without citing Kipling even once? Another interesting movie that mapped the diversity of accents of a large, semi-imperial country was "The Death of Stalin". I'm still waiting for the live-action version of the Gospels that gives everyone from Galilee a New Jersey accent. (Snarky, snobbish comments like "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" came from somewhere, after all.)
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  170. I'm sorry, but the actual armed invasions of Eastern European countries involving Soviet tanks and troops are NOT "just the same" as American influence operations in South America. Your bias is showing. Please correct it.
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  171. Wasn't the food that Kamehameha ate with the women, also a legally female-only food? A type of dog, much like a fat Pomeranian?
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  172. "He's saving a burning building with relative ease" Saving a burning building from a toddler?
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  173. I've heard the argument that Sulla's proscriptions led to the (sometimes literal) gutting of Rome's ruling class, destroying their ability to maintain the Republic's institutions as they had for centuries.
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