I remember watching Vikings and finding it reasonably entertaining. I think because it was talking about a piece of history in the British Isles that i didn't know much about! I did give up after a season or two, though.
I get that these gritty period shows are trying to portray the world in those days as more violent and unforgiving than it is today, but i think they get it wrong when they trivialize the barbarity in a way that i don't believe people would have done even in those times. I recently watched Shogun, which is the same genre of "people were shit in the olden days", but i think they did a really good job contextualizing the violence into the society, and showing how even when there are events that we would consider unspeakably brutal nowadays, it's not as if people in that era just went "lol, another dead guy". People still have a sense of morality - that's been documented for thousands of years. We're not just mindless amoeba spreading across a Petri dish.
Lower Decks is great. I might rewatch from the beginning when it ends after the next season. I don't think i really appreciated the early seasons enough.
I think with so many of those Period Violence Dramas... they focus on soldiers/war/fighting because... because OUR society is obsessed with unnecessary and extravagant violence, (hopefully) not because everyone actually believes all old societies were unnecessarily/extravagantly violent.
I thought Vikings had pretty rich daily-life storytelling which I enjoyed and really did a decent job of establishing how gender roles were not that strict and sexual mores were different and... **it was not a problem**... which is always nice to see since it's so damned rare in U.S. entertainment.
Even our history textbooks are like that... battle to battle, war to war, "hero" to "hero".... with anything about women/children/family life/homelife in their own little section (if at all), and politics/economics even pushed to the side most of the time,... but I think it's more our modern obsession with violence-as-power that keeps our storytelling seeming so damned shallow and monotonous to the Rest of Us.
I get that these gritty period shows are trying to portray the world in those days as more violent and unforgiving than it is today, but i think they get it wrong when they trivialize the barbarity in a way that i don't believe people would have done even in those times. I recently watched Shogun, which is the same genre of "people were shit in the olden days", but i think they did a really good job contextualizing the violence into the society, and showing how even when there are events that we would consider unspeakably brutal nowadays, it's not as if people in that era just went "lol, another dead guy". People still have a sense of morality - that's been documented for thousands of years. We're not just mindless amoeba spreading across a Petri dish.
Lower Decks is great. I might rewatch from the beginning when it ends after the next season. I don't think i really appreciated the early seasons enough.
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I think with so many of those Period Violence Dramas... they focus on soldiers/war/fighting because... because OUR society is obsessed with unnecessary and extravagant violence, (hopefully) not because everyone actually believes all old societies were unnecessarily/extravagantly violent.
I thought Vikings had pretty rich daily-life storytelling which I enjoyed and really did a decent job of establishing how gender roles were not that strict and sexual mores were different and... **it was not a problem**... which is always nice to see since it's so damned rare in U.S. entertainment.
Even our history textbooks are like that... battle to battle, war to war, "hero" to "hero".... with anything about women/children/family life/homelife in their own little section (if at all), and politics/economics even pushed to the side most of the time,... but I think it's more our modern obsession with violence-as-power that keeps our storytelling seeming so damned shallow and monotonous to the Rest of Us.
P.S. Lower Decks Forever!
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