Phoenix Nirvana: Casually Sexist Shangri-la. Also, torture porn.
I'm pretty much not on LJ anymore, so feel free to ignore this post. It's like LJ is just here to be the dumping ground for the fuckton of vitriol I need to spew every once in a while. Archaeologists in the future will be digging up our ancient civilization and they'll come across my vitriol and be like, whoa, that is an entire metric ton of hate. Check it out. Weigh it on the scale. Yup. One whole fuckton of fossilized passionate loathing. Put it next to the fossilized pizza.
Phoenix Nirvana is a shitty drama and I despise it with all my being even though I'm not even watching it most of the time. Yup, it's another one of those dramas that I randomly downloaded because it sounded interesting. It's there to entertain my parents who are... suitably entertained, I guess, though they're a bit weirded out by some parts of the show too. The director really sucks and god-mods this team of super soldiers to extremely unrealistic heights. Bleh.
So apparently the show was really popular when it aired. And the premise sounds pretty good as well. It's supposedly about the trials and tribulations of a group of female special forces soldiers. They go through life or death situations together and forge lifelong friendships and come out the other end stronger and even more awesomer than ever before. Supposedly. It's *actually* about the Neverending and Totally Justified Manpain of their commanding officer, a Mr. Thunder War. That is his name. Not his codename, which is Thunder God. His name is Thunder War. Like seriously, what were his parents smoking when they had him? He must have gone on playdates with other children and when they asked for his name he'd be like "Thunder War" and they'd be like "...Pfahahaha! Hey, let's play soldiers." And from then on he could never escape the military. His high school guidance counselor took one look at his record, big ol' name printed on top and said, "Welp! Son, have you considered the army?" It's no surprise that with a name like that he turned out to be a huge douche made entirely out of smaller douches.
The story opens up on a happy military couple. The woman has asked for a transfer because she doesn't want to be that person who dates her co-worker. And there's probably rules against that, so there we go. She gets her transfer blah blah. The man, a younger, less Matryoshka-doll-of-douche Thunder War (lol no I will not call him Lei Zhan because Thunder War is too hilarious to pass up), is all happy and stuff and they're gonna get married! Then she has horrible period pains and cramps the hell up and he's all casually sexist about it, yay! Then she dies because shit goes down while she's on her period.
Truth, yo. They were, IDK, doing something counter-terroristy with explosives and she cramped up and got blown up, I'm serious. So serious here. This happened. I couldn't reach this level of sexist irony if I tried. Wow. What killed her? Being a woman killed her. Cue Thunder War's Manpain. Oh boo hoo hoo, if only she'd had the woman trained out of her she could have survived! Timeskip! Nine years later, he is the douchemaster.
More stuff happens blah blah. Some women sign up for dubious special training headed by Thunder War. He's gonna turn them into super soldiers... by torturing the heck out of them. It starts out douchey but tame. He yells at them in standard army style, telling them that they're worthless sacks of shit who will never last, etc. They do a lot of push-ups and have points docked for insubordination and whatnot. A lot of candidates are weeded out, and then it devolves into torture porn. I'm not saying that lightly. For a while there I was pretty sure I was watching the beginnings of a snuff film or some hardcore BDSM with heaps of humiliation kink on top, just without the nudity because the PRC is sensitive about nudity. (But not sensitive about torture, apparently.)
Thunder War's dubious special training involves outright torture on a level that is hells of illegal. My brother was next to me for this portion and he looked up from his 3DS and said, "That looks illegal. Isn't that illegal?" And I said, "Yup, that's pretty illegal." Sir douche-within-a-douche brushes it off saying that "you signed up for this" and "all you have to do to stop the torture is to drop out of the program". They signed up for special forces training, and part of that is understandably training to resist torture. They didn't sign up for being actually tortured to life-threatening levels and then refused medical attention. Someone (the producer of this shitfest) didn't do the fucking research about psychological manipulation and what people will do to please authority figures. You think the soldiers are actually going to quit when an authority figure brainwashes them through isolation (cutting off all contact with the outside world for months) and then sneers at them all the time that they're worthless and the only way to earn his approval is to go through this torture? Weird, cruel, unusual stuff happens to people when they're put in isolation situations like this. The ones who stuck with the training (instead of leaving in shame WTF) probably just bought into the psych experiment a little more, internalized their roles, got a little more "into the game", as it were, and couldn't tell that there was actually a way out through forfeit. (See: Stanford Prison Experiment)
While Thunder War's lackeys started to sweat at the kind of torture they were inflicting, he remained stone-faced and kept repeating that what they were doing was necessary because if the women were ever kidnapped by insurgents, they would go through far worse. Would they really? And even if they would - of which we have no proof because what if the terrorists actually had a single shred of decency and/or realized that torture doesn't work most of the time - how is that any kind of reason to actually go through with all the stuff the bad guys might do? I like how he has justifications for everything like a total jackass Gary Stu, and in the end his goons nod and say, "Yeah, you're right, boss. This is for their own good." Nevermind the fact that soldiers are useless to you if they die during training before they can ever be used in combat, this is for their own good! These were done for their own good:
1) Drug injections. An amphetamine of some sort? is injected into the victim until she screams and shakes and looks for all the world like she's having a seizure. Her heart rate rises until a warning pops up on the monitor - it's way too high and she's about to go into cardiac arrest. Then they inject her again. And again, for good measure.
2) Drowning/hanging. The victim has her head submerged in a barrel of water until she can't hold her breath anymore. He pulls her up, lets her breathe once, then dunks her down again. Repeat many times. Afterwards, the victim is strung up and left to hand upside down in front of her peers for hours to serve as a "warning".
3) Withholding medical attention. A doctor arrives to oversee their "intensive training", but he is refused entrance. The victim who underwent the drug injections is suffering from a high fever - the monitors are beeping and shit, the doctor yells to be allowed to treat her, and Thunder War says nope. They are to be kept locked in a shed because that's how things go in real life torture, which this training exercise is "just mimicking".
4) Electroshock. Same victim as in 1 and 3. Drugged up and feverish, and now shocked until she passes out again. Still no medical attention.
There's also a whole bunch of humiliation shit, like how the women are pulled into the torture chamber by their hair, they're sprayed with pepper spray, then a fire extinguisher, then with a hose until they're cowering on the ground. Just imagine the scene: a group of women, soaked and cowering at the feet of rugged military men, all standing tall and official and intimidating and also smirking down at them because Thunder War is always smirking like an ass bastard. Also, while the women are huddling in their shack, the men hang out in this comfy little control station room, watching them on monitors, making offhand/flippant comments about them. I don't know how this is not very much a creepy as fuck male gaze/sexist thing? I mean, these guys lounging around in the control station actually have full control over those womens' lives and I don't think I've ever seen such a perfect metaphor for the male gaze than to have them literally fucking monitoring a group of battered women, saying "What about her?" and then having dudes go in and pull that one out by her hair and start whaling on her, and repeat ad nauseum.
Oh, but of course it's not sexist or abusive because they say it's not. Thunder War says, over and over again, "you're not regular women, you're soldiers". And that's fine, except that I'm pretty fucking sure that all the male soldiers standing around carrying out the tortures didn't go through this same shit themselves. The reason the women go through it is because the director of the drama is a sexist piece of shit with a torture-boner. And if it is, in this universe, something that the men go through as well, then... It's something that the men shouldn't have had to go through! I still don't see it as an equality thing. It's torture, plain and simple. At this point I'm like, "Director Dude, just 'cuz you say it's not doesn't mean it's not" because we all know those shitheads who are all "I'm not racist, they're just so different and icky and morally bankrupt!" So yeah, keep chanting that non-sexist mantra at yourself, Director Dude. Maybe it'll come true when your ass ruptures and births out a chupacabra.
The doctor who tried to bust in and treat them is, while also casually sexist, a kind person. And kind people in this drama are treated like butt monkeys. He's the "comic relief". And, okay, here's a nitpick about the cinematography - it sucks. You go from dark torture scene to lighthearted clown music whenever the doctor comes in and tries to rescue them, and mood whiplash back and forth for like 2-3 whole episodes. The joke: he's incompetent because he's a gentleman and only barbarian cavemen get the ladies in this show. They try to set the doctor up as the nominal bad guy at the moment by pinning all the sexist crap on him. When he tries to rescue the women, he keeps saying, "But they're women! You can't do this to women!" essentially setting up a straw man for Thunder War to step in and say, "No, they're soldiers and they're equal to men! I'm just treating them with equality!" IT'S SUCH A FUCKING TRANSPARENT STRAW MAN BECAUSE NO ONE SHOULD BE TORTURED IN THE FIRST PLACE I MEAN IF THEY WERE MALE SOLDIERS IT WOULD STILL BE HELLS OF ILLEGAL TO DENY THEM MEDICAL ATTENTION. JESUS MILITARY PROPAGANDA CHRIST STOP DEFLECTING FROM THE REAL ISSUE BY PUTTING UP THIS NONEXISTENT MALE-FEMALE DICHOTOMY IT'S NOT ABOUT BIOLOGICAL SEX IT'S ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND HAVING THE TINIEST MICROSCOPIC SHRED OF BASIC HUMAN DECENCY. (It's also about how creepy it is that the show hints that the male-gaze creepiness is "necessary" in training female soldiers b/c they totes need training in sexual harassment in order to be soldiers b/c that's gonna happen in real life so let's do some "practical" training first! It's really great that a man in a position of authority gets to tell women what's good for them and have his points be validated at every turn by his lackeys and the dumbass plot!)
Showdowns between the two male characters in the early part of the series are just displays of idiocy with two giant idiots butting heads over which type of sexism is correct. I could make a mockumentary out of it and it'd be called, "Idiot Mating Displays: In Which Assholes Vie for Female Attention By Seeing Who Can Be More Sexist Because Women Like Being Patronized". Because seriously, Thunder War gets too much heavy-handed "you should like this guy" moments for the show to actually be about the women and not about him and how "awesome" he is to have trained them into super soldiers.... just like himself! It nauseates me, actually. Every time they try to force me to like him I end up hating him more. This man: he is layered like an onion. (Spoiler: all the layers are douche.)
Blargh! Whatever. What really really really pisses me off is how the doctor was treated after the women "passed the test". His would-be girlfriend was actually among the candidates - she was the one who was tortured the most - and he nurses her back to health. Instead of being thankful, she's like, "What are you doing here?" And he's like, "Looking out for you," and she's like, "Waah! Tantrum! I'm not a toddler I can take care of myself!!!" Okay. Things that are wrong with this: too many. Because... because she's not fine. Maybe he's overbearing, overprotective, and it's annoying. I get that. If she was a normal girl and he tailed her to her fucking office job, I would be 100% on her side. But in this case, when she's fucking lying on a hospital bed? After she's been injected with god knows what mindfucking drugs, been starved, been beaten, gone through a bunch of deprivation shit with psycho intimidation tactics and all, and, oh, SHOCKED UNTIL HER HEART GAVE OUT, that-- that's not cause for concern, is it? She's "fine", she can "take care of herself", and he's just being sexist and patronizing for being concerned for her, isn't that right. To be a "strong" woman means buying into the idea that men beating you is fine as long as you can "take it" and you gotta lose all your manners and common sense and get all prickly whenever anyone asks if you're okay. Because "strong" people don't have emotional needs and don't need any sort of aftercare in the wake of huge-ass psychological trauma, isn't that right. Yeah, I thought so.
>:|
It gets worse. See, during the torture session, she kept screaming that she was going to sue the pants off of Thunder War, get him court martialed for getting his illegal torture jollies off. After that? She seems to have forgotten her hatred. Immediately. WTF. All the women just drop their hatred of him and go back to treating him with respect as if he were a normal commanding officer. They even jump to his defense.
No no no, that's not how it works because they've gone though PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA and they pretty much would never be able to respect that piece of shit again. Seeing his face should trigger them into a frenzy filled with horrid flashbacks and shit. If this were the real world and all. This drama handwaves all that away, pretends that they understood and agreed that the torture they went through was "necessary" and even "good for them" until I'm left thinking, "Gee, maybe they all have Stockholm Syndrome". And here's when the WORST, ABSOLUTE WORST thing happens.
During the fight between the doctor and his not-girlfriend, Thunder War Bastard Extraordinaire walks in. The doctor has just been rejected, and he's pissed. He points to Thunder War and says, "So what, is this your type? Did you want me to be a barbarian like him who would beat women yadda yadda," and she's all "blah blah that's not what I said". Except... she and Thunder War have an Awkward Moment and Unresolved Sexual Tension enters the scene, foreshadowing (again, heavy-handed because this show's script is so much shit they can't do anything without shoving it in your face) that they like like each other and will probably end up together. Words cannot express how much I detest that idea. It's like they're trying to brush away the TORTURE, TORTURE, and oh, did I mention TORTURE that just happened by pretending that it was Thunder War's idea of playground pigtail-pulling shenanigans like it's okay that he just tortured her extra hard because he liked her.
It's true that this particular woman was tortured the most. It really seemed like Thunder War had a vendetta against her because she was the most outspoken about how his methods are inhumane. It turns out that she reminds him of his dead girlfriend and he's all, "I gotta be harsh on them otherwise they'll die like my past girlfriend did since she wasn't trained well enough". Okay, like, I understand his motivations for being such a huge fuckup, but that doesn't mean he's not a mega huge fuckup and I hate him. And also, this show is pretty much advocating for people to forgive their abusers. I don't care if the beating happens because it's an alcoholic who can only feel good about himself if he's bullying his wife or if it happens because it's a military man abusing his power to "toughen up" his soldiers, sometimes shit just crosses a line and you don't EVER forgive that abuser. NEVER EVER, no amount of groveling will do. (And who am I kidding? Thunder War would never grovel.) You especially don't blush around him and think he's all strong and manly and desirable in ANY WAY, NEVER EVER. This dungheap and his dungheap behavior should not be presented as a positive person/thing/pile of broken glass and phlegm when aired on television. But it is. And so I weep.
Maybe the show got better in later episodes (the ones I watched even less because I sneered just walking into the room while they were on). Maybe, but I don't give a fuck. The damage has already been done and nothing can make it better. There are ways of presenting a morally ambiguous character as sympathetic, but this fuckassery is not an example. I really would have enjoyed a show where Thunder War was the bad guy and, after escaping torture, the women actually got him court martialed and then took charge of their own unit and proceeded to kick ass. Nope. Instead, this show that's trying to be all "ooh, we're sooo equal" has women merely serving as props for male fantasy - there to pander to male interests, there to throw away all traces of femininity as if the only way to be a strong woman is to not be a woman at all, and there to take a bunch of beatings in order to be seen as "one of the guys" because male approval is all there is in this world. (But then they mysteriously regain said femininity when it's time to run around in nothing but shorts/hot pants and sports bras, showing off their thigh gaps - of which every single actress has - while stroking a bunch of phallic rifles and shooting terrorists in the face, after which they let out girly squeals and give each other jiggly high-fives. Oh wait, that's not femininity or female-oriented-anything, it's just male-centric sex appeal.) So fucking sad, this drama.
BTW Thunder War totally got the girl victim in the end. Yup, they get their loving macks on. The doctor also eventually sees the light hallelujah and converts to Thunder War's ideas about masculinity and how being a fuckwad meathead violent soldier is the only way to go, so then he picks up a gun and gets some other lady. Asshole = get laid. They couldn't even leave one nonviolent character on screen? Couldn't even have one character, butt monkey though he is, question the ethics of Gary Stu's actions? Wow such progressive gender roles I am in awe. Textbook example of why patriarchy is bad for males, there you go.
:( :( :( :( :( :(
Phoenix Nirvana is a shitty drama and I despise it with all my being even though I'm not even watching it most of the time. Yup, it's another one of those dramas that I randomly downloaded because it sounded interesting. It's there to entertain my parents who are... suitably entertained, I guess, though they're a bit weirded out by some parts of the show too. The director really sucks and god-mods this team of super soldiers to extremely unrealistic heights. Bleh.
So apparently the show was really popular when it aired. And the premise sounds pretty good as well. It's supposedly about the trials and tribulations of a group of female special forces soldiers. They go through life or death situations together and forge lifelong friendships and come out the other end stronger and even more awesomer than ever before. Supposedly. It's *actually* about the Neverending and Totally Justified Manpain of their commanding officer, a Mr. Thunder War. That is his name. Not his codename, which is Thunder God. His name is Thunder War. Like seriously, what were his parents smoking when they had him? He must have gone on playdates with other children and when they asked for his name he'd be like "Thunder War" and they'd be like "...Pfahahaha! Hey, let's play soldiers." And from then on he could never escape the military. His high school guidance counselor took one look at his record, big ol' name printed on top and said, "Welp! Son, have you considered the army?" It's no surprise that with a name like that he turned out to be a huge douche made entirely out of smaller douches.
The story opens up on a happy military couple. The woman has asked for a transfer because she doesn't want to be that person who dates her co-worker. And there's probably rules against that, so there we go. She gets her transfer blah blah. The man, a younger, less Matryoshka-doll-of-douche Thunder War (lol no I will not call him Lei Zhan because Thunder War is too hilarious to pass up), is all happy and stuff and they're gonna get married! Then she has horrible period pains and cramps the hell up and he's all casually sexist about it, yay! Then she dies because shit goes down while she's on her period.
Truth, yo. They were, IDK, doing something counter-terroristy with explosives and she cramped up and got blown up, I'm serious. So serious here. This happened. I couldn't reach this level of sexist irony if I tried. Wow. What killed her? Being a woman killed her. Cue Thunder War's Manpain. Oh boo hoo hoo, if only she'd had the woman trained out of her she could have survived! Timeskip! Nine years later, he is the douchemaster.
More stuff happens blah blah. Some women sign up for dubious special training headed by Thunder War. He's gonna turn them into super soldiers... by torturing the heck out of them. It starts out douchey but tame. He yells at them in standard army style, telling them that they're worthless sacks of shit who will never last, etc. They do a lot of push-ups and have points docked for insubordination and whatnot. A lot of candidates are weeded out, and then it devolves into torture porn. I'm not saying that lightly. For a while there I was pretty sure I was watching the beginnings of a snuff film or some hardcore BDSM with heaps of humiliation kink on top, just without the nudity because the PRC is sensitive about nudity. (But not sensitive about torture, apparently.)
Thunder War's dubious special training involves outright torture on a level that is hells of illegal. My brother was next to me for this portion and he looked up from his 3DS and said, "That looks illegal. Isn't that illegal?" And I said, "Yup, that's pretty illegal." Sir douche-within-a-douche brushes it off saying that "you signed up for this" and "all you have to do to stop the torture is to drop out of the program". They signed up for special forces training, and part of that is understandably training to resist torture. They didn't sign up for being actually tortured to life-threatening levels and then refused medical attention. Someone (the producer of this shitfest) didn't do the fucking research about psychological manipulation and what people will do to please authority figures. You think the soldiers are actually going to quit when an authority figure brainwashes them through isolation (cutting off all contact with the outside world for months) and then sneers at them all the time that they're worthless and the only way to earn his approval is to go through this torture? Weird, cruel, unusual stuff happens to people when they're put in isolation situations like this. The ones who stuck with the training (instead of leaving in shame WTF) probably just bought into the psych experiment a little more, internalized their roles, got a little more "into the game", as it were, and couldn't tell that there was actually a way out through forfeit. (See: Stanford Prison Experiment)
While Thunder War's lackeys started to sweat at the kind of torture they were inflicting, he remained stone-faced and kept repeating that what they were doing was necessary because if the women were ever kidnapped by insurgents, they would go through far worse. Would they really? And even if they would - of which we have no proof because what if the terrorists actually had a single shred of decency and/or realized that torture doesn't work most of the time - how is that any kind of reason to actually go through with all the stuff the bad guys might do? I like how he has justifications for everything like a total jackass Gary Stu, and in the end his goons nod and say, "Yeah, you're right, boss. This is for their own good." Nevermind the fact that soldiers are useless to you if they die during training before they can ever be used in combat, this is for their own good! These were done for their own good:
1) Drug injections. An amphetamine of some sort? is injected into the victim until she screams and shakes and looks for all the world like she's having a seizure. Her heart rate rises until a warning pops up on the monitor - it's way too high and she's about to go into cardiac arrest. Then they inject her again. And again, for good measure.
2) Drowning/hanging. The victim has her head submerged in a barrel of water until she can't hold her breath anymore. He pulls her up, lets her breathe once, then dunks her down again. Repeat many times. Afterwards, the victim is strung up and left to hand upside down in front of her peers for hours to serve as a "warning".
3) Withholding medical attention. A doctor arrives to oversee their "intensive training", but he is refused entrance. The victim who underwent the drug injections is suffering from a high fever - the monitors are beeping and shit, the doctor yells to be allowed to treat her, and Thunder War says nope. They are to be kept locked in a shed because that's how things go in real life torture, which this training exercise is "just mimicking".
4) Electroshock. Same victim as in 1 and 3. Drugged up and feverish, and now shocked until she passes out again. Still no medical attention.
There's also a whole bunch of humiliation shit, like how the women are pulled into the torture chamber by their hair, they're sprayed with pepper spray, then a fire extinguisher, then with a hose until they're cowering on the ground. Just imagine the scene: a group of women, soaked and cowering at the feet of rugged military men, all standing tall and official and intimidating and also smirking down at them because Thunder War is always smirking like an ass bastard. Also, while the women are huddling in their shack, the men hang out in this comfy little control station room, watching them on monitors, making offhand/flippant comments about them. I don't know how this is not very much a creepy as fuck male gaze/sexist thing? I mean, these guys lounging around in the control station actually have full control over those womens' lives and I don't think I've ever seen such a perfect metaphor for the male gaze than to have them literally fucking monitoring a group of battered women, saying "What about her?" and then having dudes go in and pull that one out by her hair and start whaling on her, and repeat ad nauseum.
Oh, but of course it's not sexist or abusive because they say it's not. Thunder War says, over and over again, "you're not regular women, you're soldiers". And that's fine, except that I'm pretty fucking sure that all the male soldiers standing around carrying out the tortures didn't go through this same shit themselves. The reason the women go through it is because the director of the drama is a sexist piece of shit with a torture-boner. And if it is, in this universe, something that the men go through as well, then... It's something that the men shouldn't have had to go through! I still don't see it as an equality thing. It's torture, plain and simple. At this point I'm like, "Director Dude, just 'cuz you say it's not doesn't mean it's not" because we all know those shitheads who are all "I'm not racist, they're just so different and icky and morally bankrupt!" So yeah, keep chanting that non-sexist mantra at yourself, Director Dude. Maybe it'll come true when your ass ruptures and births out a chupacabra.
The doctor who tried to bust in and treat them is, while also casually sexist, a kind person. And kind people in this drama are treated like butt monkeys. He's the "comic relief". And, okay, here's a nitpick about the cinematography - it sucks. You go from dark torture scene to lighthearted clown music whenever the doctor comes in and tries to rescue them, and mood whiplash back and forth for like 2-3 whole episodes. The joke: he's incompetent because he's a gentleman and only barbarian cavemen get the ladies in this show. They try to set the doctor up as the nominal bad guy at the moment by pinning all the sexist crap on him. When he tries to rescue the women, he keeps saying, "But they're women! You can't do this to women!" essentially setting up a straw man for Thunder War to step in and say, "No, they're soldiers and they're equal to men! I'm just treating them with equality!" IT'S SUCH A FUCKING TRANSPARENT STRAW MAN BECAUSE NO ONE SHOULD BE TORTURED IN THE FIRST PLACE I MEAN IF THEY WERE MALE SOLDIERS IT WOULD STILL BE HELLS OF ILLEGAL TO DENY THEM MEDICAL ATTENTION. JESUS MILITARY PROPAGANDA CHRIST STOP DEFLECTING FROM THE REAL ISSUE BY PUTTING UP THIS NONEXISTENT MALE-FEMALE DICHOTOMY IT'S NOT ABOUT BIOLOGICAL SEX IT'S ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS AND HAVING THE TINIEST MICROSCOPIC SHRED OF BASIC HUMAN DECENCY. (It's also about how creepy it is that the show hints that the male-gaze creepiness is "necessary" in training female soldiers b/c they totes need training in sexual harassment in order to be soldiers b/c that's gonna happen in real life so let's do some "practical" training first! It's really great that a man in a position of authority gets to tell women what's good for them and have his points be validated at every turn by his lackeys and the dumbass plot!)
Showdowns between the two male characters in the early part of the series are just displays of idiocy with two giant idiots butting heads over which type of sexism is correct. I could make a mockumentary out of it and it'd be called, "Idiot Mating Displays: In Which Assholes Vie for Female Attention By Seeing Who Can Be More Sexist Because Women Like Being Patronized". Because seriously, Thunder War gets too much heavy-handed "you should like this guy" moments for the show to actually be about the women and not about him and how "awesome" he is to have trained them into super soldiers.... just like himself! It nauseates me, actually. Every time they try to force me to like him I end up hating him more. This man: he is layered like an onion. (Spoiler: all the layers are douche.)
Blargh! Whatever. What really really really pisses me off is how the doctor was treated after the women "passed the test". His would-be girlfriend was actually among the candidates - she was the one who was tortured the most - and he nurses her back to health. Instead of being thankful, she's like, "What are you doing here?" And he's like, "Looking out for you," and she's like, "Waah! Tantrum! I'm not a toddler I can take care of myself!!!" Okay. Things that are wrong with this: too many. Because... because she's not fine. Maybe he's overbearing, overprotective, and it's annoying. I get that. If she was a normal girl and he tailed her to her fucking office job, I would be 100% on her side. But in this case, when she's fucking lying on a hospital bed? After she's been injected with god knows what mindfucking drugs, been starved, been beaten, gone through a bunch of deprivation shit with psycho intimidation tactics and all, and, oh, SHOCKED UNTIL HER HEART GAVE OUT, that-- that's not cause for concern, is it? She's "fine", she can "take care of herself", and he's just being sexist and patronizing for being concerned for her, isn't that right. To be a "strong" woman means buying into the idea that men beating you is fine as long as you can "take it" and you gotta lose all your manners and common sense and get all prickly whenever anyone asks if you're okay. Because "strong" people don't have emotional needs and don't need any sort of aftercare in the wake of huge-ass psychological trauma, isn't that right. Yeah, I thought so.
>:|
It gets worse. See, during the torture session, she kept screaming that she was going to sue the pants off of Thunder War, get him court martialed for getting his illegal torture jollies off. After that? She seems to have forgotten her hatred. Immediately. WTF. All the women just drop their hatred of him and go back to treating him with respect as if he were a normal commanding officer. They even jump to his defense.
No no no, that's not how it works because they've gone though PSYCHOLOGICAL TRAUMA and they pretty much would never be able to respect that piece of shit again. Seeing his face should trigger them into a frenzy filled with horrid flashbacks and shit. If this were the real world and all. This drama handwaves all that away, pretends that they understood and agreed that the torture they went through was "necessary" and even "good for them" until I'm left thinking, "Gee, maybe they all have Stockholm Syndrome". And here's when the WORST, ABSOLUTE WORST thing happens.
During the fight between the doctor and his not-girlfriend, Thunder War Bastard Extraordinaire walks in. The doctor has just been rejected, and he's pissed. He points to Thunder War and says, "So what, is this your type? Did you want me to be a barbarian like him who would beat women yadda yadda," and she's all "blah blah that's not what I said". Except... she and Thunder War have an Awkward Moment and Unresolved Sexual Tension enters the scene, foreshadowing (again, heavy-handed because this show's script is so much shit they can't do anything without shoving it in your face) that they like like each other and will probably end up together. Words cannot express how much I detest that idea. It's like they're trying to brush away the TORTURE, TORTURE, and oh, did I mention TORTURE that just happened by pretending that it was Thunder War's idea of playground pigtail-pulling shenanigans like it's okay that he just tortured her extra hard because he liked her.
It's true that this particular woman was tortured the most. It really seemed like Thunder War had a vendetta against her because she was the most outspoken about how his methods are inhumane. It turns out that she reminds him of his dead girlfriend and he's all, "I gotta be harsh on them otherwise they'll die like my past girlfriend did since she wasn't trained well enough". Okay, like, I understand his motivations for being such a huge fuckup, but that doesn't mean he's not a mega huge fuckup and I hate him. And also, this show is pretty much advocating for people to forgive their abusers. I don't care if the beating happens because it's an alcoholic who can only feel good about himself if he's bullying his wife or if it happens because it's a military man abusing his power to "toughen up" his soldiers, sometimes shit just crosses a line and you don't EVER forgive that abuser. NEVER EVER, no amount of groveling will do. (And who am I kidding? Thunder War would never grovel.) You especially don't blush around him and think he's all strong and manly and desirable in ANY WAY, NEVER EVER. This dungheap and his dungheap behavior should not be presented as a positive person/thing/pile of broken glass and phlegm when aired on television. But it is. And so I weep.
Maybe the show got better in later episodes (the ones I watched even less because I sneered just walking into the room while they were on). Maybe, but I don't give a fuck. The damage has already been done and nothing can make it better. There are ways of presenting a morally ambiguous character as sympathetic, but this fuckassery is not an example. I really would have enjoyed a show where Thunder War was the bad guy and, after escaping torture, the women actually got him court martialed and then took charge of their own unit and proceeded to kick ass. Nope. Instead, this show that's trying to be all "ooh, we're sooo equal" has women merely serving as props for male fantasy - there to pander to male interests, there to throw away all traces of femininity as if the only way to be a strong woman is to not be a woman at all, and there to take a bunch of beatings in order to be seen as "one of the guys" because male approval is all there is in this world. (But then they mysteriously regain said femininity when it's time to run around in nothing but shorts/hot pants and sports bras, showing off their thigh gaps - of which every single actress has - while stroking a bunch of phallic rifles and shooting terrorists in the face, after which they let out girly squeals and give each other jiggly high-fives. Oh wait, that's not femininity or female-oriented-anything, it's just male-centric sex appeal.) So fucking sad, this drama.
BTW Thunder War totally got the girl victim in the end. Yup, they get their loving macks on. The doctor also eventually sees the light hallelujah and converts to Thunder War's ideas about masculinity and how being a fuckwad meathead violent soldier is the only way to go, so then he picks up a gun and gets some other lady. Asshole = get laid. They couldn't even leave one nonviolent character on screen? Couldn't even have one character, butt monkey though he is, question the ethics of Gary Stu's actions? Wow such progressive gender roles I am in awe. Textbook example of why patriarchy is bad for males, there you go.
:( :( :( :( :( :(