Poison ivy and harley quinn fanfic

Hello lovelies!
I'm feeling somewhat under the weather this week, however my friend Jack very kindly helped me put this together. It's the usual 30 question midweek quiz and we've got rounds on; Sport, Bugs, Insects, and Creepy Crawlies, and a General Knowledge Round.
The GK round is included below if you don't want to do the whole thing. I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.sundayquiz.com/wednesday-30-questions-29-03-2023/
Questions - General Knowledge

1. Who played Poison Ivy in the 1997 film Batman and Robin?
2. One of the first hospitals for the mentally ill, which hospital in London in around the fourteenth century quickly became a byword for chaos and madness that has stuck around up to today?
3. What 'H' is a unit of measurement for the height of horses?
4. Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey is the setting for which American medical drama series?
5. What is the collective noun for a group of lizards?
6. How many stars does the New Zealand flag have?
7. How many herbs and spices does KFC claim to have in their secret recipe?
8. How many US States share a border with Mexico?
9. What town's name means ‘house of bread’ in Hebrew?
10. What group of natural pigments affect the colour of your hair and skin?

Answers

1. Uma Thurman
2. Bedlam#####
3. Hand(s)#####
4. House######
5. A Lounge###
6. Four#######
7. Eleven#####
8. Four#######
9. Bethlehem##
10. Melanin####

More quizzes...

Hello lovelies!
I'm feeling somewhat under the weather this week, however my friend Jack very kindly helped me put this together. It's the usual 30 question midweek quiz and we've got rounds on; Sport, Bugs, Insects, and Creepy Crawlies, and a General Knowledge Round.
The GK round is included below if you don't want to do the whole thing. I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.sundayquiz.com/wednesday-30-questions-29-03-2023/
Questions - General Knowledge

1. Who played Poison Ivy in the 1997 film Batman and Robin?
2. One of the first hospitals for the mentally ill, which hospital in London in around the fourteenth century quickly became a byword for chaos and madness that has stuck around up to today?
3. What 'H' is a unit of measurement for the height of horses?
4. Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey is the setting for which American medical drama series?
5. What is the collective noun for a group of lizards?
6. How many stars does the New Zealand flag have?
7. How many herbs and spices does KFC claim to have in their secret recipe?
8. How many US States share a border with Mexico?
9. What town's name means ‘house of bread’ in Hebrew?
10. What group of natural pigments affect the colour of your hair and skin?

Answers

1. Uma Thurman
2. Bedlam#####
3. Hand(s)#####
4. House######
5. A Lounge###
6. Four#######
7. Eleven#####
8. Four#######
9. Bethlehem##
10. Melanin####

More quizzes...

Hello lovelies!
I'm feeling somewhat under the weather this week, however my friend Jack very kindly helped me put this together. It's the usual 30 question midweek quiz and we've got rounds on; Sport, Bugs, Insects, and Creepy Crawlies, and a General Knowledge Round.
The GK round is included below if you don't want to do the whole thing. I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.sundayquiz.com/wednesday-30-questions-29-03-2023/
Questions - General Knowledge

1. Who played Poison Ivy in the 1997 film Batman and Robin?
2. One of the first hospitals for the mentally ill, which hospital in London in around the fourteenth century quickly became a byword for chaos and madness that has stuck around up to today?
3. What 'H' is a unit of measurement for the height of horses?
4. Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey is the setting for which American medical drama series?
5. What is the collective noun for a group of lizards?
6. How many stars does the New Zealand flag have?
7. How many herbs and spices does KFC claim to have in their secret recipe?
8. How many US States share a border with Mexico?
9. What town's name means ‘house of bread’ in Hebrew?
10. What group of natural pigments affect the colour of your hair and skin?

Answers

1. Uma Thurman
2. Bedlam#####
3. Hand(s)#####
4. House######
5. A Lounge###
6. Four#######
7. Eleven#####
8. Four#######
9. Bethlehem##
10. Melanin####

More quizzes...

Hello lovelies!
I'm feeling somewhat under the weather this week, however my friend Jack very kindly helped me put this together. It's the usual 30 question midweek quiz and we've got rounds on; Sport, Bugs, Insects, and Creepy Crawlies, and a General Knowledge Round.
The GK round is included below if you don't want to do the whole thing. I hope you enjoy it.
https://www.sundayquiz.com/wednesday-30-questions-29-03-2023/
Questions - General Knowledge

1. Who played Poison Ivy in the 1997 film Batman and Robin?
2. One of the first hospitals for the mentally ill, which hospital in London in around the fourteenth century quickly became a byword for chaos and madness that has stuck around up to today?
3. What 'H' is a unit of measurement for the height of horses?
4. Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital in New Jersey is the setting for which American medical drama series?
5. What is the collective noun for a group of lizards?
6. How many stars does the New Zealand flag have?
7. How many herbs and spices does KFC claim to have in their secret recipe?
8. How many US States share a border with Mexico?
9. What town's name means ‘house of bread’ in Hebrew?
10. What group of natural pigments affect the colour of your hair and skin?

Answers

1. Uma Thurman
2. Bedlam#####
3. Hand(s)#####
4. House######
5. A Lounge###
6. Four#######
7. Eleven#####
8. Four#######
9. Bethlehem##
10. Melanin####

More quizzes...

I am a firm believer that action films require a male lead in order to be effective in the action market. Nearly every one of these films is about revenge, taking on a spirit of vengeance, or taking on the role of justice. But the strange part of this is that both vengeance and justice are feminine deities in mythology, and at multiple levels. The male action hero is less about taking revenge or enacting justice and is more about understanding their role in taking revenge, which can result in not wanting revenge at all or realizing there is something more grand to the journey they enter. This is why mystery and whodunit stories appeal to women, because women enjoy aspects of revenge and justice, while being less interested in the more masculine aspects like enlightenment and the hero’s journey.
That statement alone is enough to set any wokescold’s blood a’boiling, because it’s a factual statement.
None of this means it’s impossible to make an action movie with a female lead, it just means it will be built differently with themes exclusive to the female role. I’ve talked about the movie Furie here and there when talking about female roles in stories because it’s a clear example of how to do it right when the female role is meant to be a tiger mother archetype. The story is simple: a mother has her child kidnapped by bad guys and she goes out to retrieve her child and save her from the dangerous world they live in. This kind of story is very primitive, with how it’s no different than if a tigress lost her cub and had to find it in the wilderness. The tiger mother finds her strength by being more feminine, closer to mother earth, and using her nurturing spirit to stay dedicated to her main goal: protect her cub.
Not only protect, but also allow her cub to flourish in the world by making sure her child studies hard, gets a good job, and gives the air of “not being good enough” because that is what the world tells us every day. We will never please the world and feel comfortable at any moment for any reason unless we willingly let our guard down, and that’s when the snake devours the cub. The tiger mother views the world as harsh, unforgiving, and a constant threat of corruption that will swallow their child whole. They are not paranoid, they are realistic. They are not carefree, they are careful. This mentality causes them to become very authoritarian, and so the tiger mother might as well be called the empress, because they are to be the empress of both their world and the world of their child’s.
A fury is one of the Furies from Greek mythology, who are the 3 goddesses of vengeance. Nemesis came before them as a goddess of revenge, but it is more like Nemesis handles anger between gods and the furies cast curses upon humans. In the movie Furie, there is a detective who is after the same villain, with the villain being this drug lady(as in female version of drug lord) and she is the dark sorceress of the streets. The Drug Lady represents the terrible chaotic side of the earth mother, with her minions being these evil demons who kill and rape anything in their path. The entire story of Furie was a mythological tale presented in modern day Vietnam in one of the most beautiful depictions of such a tale I’ve seen in a while.
This is not meant to be a hero’s journey other than the journey of the detective, who gains a gift from the tiger mother in the form of protection while he also saves her in the end, meaning there is a supportive synergy going on in their relationship. The authoritarian femme fatale assisting the masculine authority is a story about control between both family and society. An action movie like this is why I love action films when they have effort put into them, because there is deep subject matter being played out through simple interactions between individuals and between that we get epic fight scenes.
Let me tell you: these fight scenes are awesome.
It’s not just about a woman beating up a bunch of dudes. It’s about how she struggles to get through each fight but will still carry on because that’s what a mother does for her child. It’s no different than when a noir hero fights his way through hordes of goons in order to enact his revenge. All of these little fights represent thoughts in our head like “give up” and “go back”, which are meant to detract us from our main goal. Get hit too much or get surrounded and we are forced to play defense or hide behind something, which is no different than being like a turtle hiding in their shell. The turtle, the hermit, only works in isolation and it’s meant to be the moment of introspect.
All of that is a way of saying that the action hero should only play defense to plan a better attack, because the world around them will not give up on the onslaught. These are the moments in an action movie where someone is healing or planning a new attack, with the occasional doubt hitting them near the end. The movie Furie has these moments, specifically for the tiger mother to heal and make a plan to get her daughter back, which enhances the movie’s credibility. We need these high and low points of an action movie for rest, progression of story, getting to know the characters more, and also we don’t expect a budget to be constant expensive action all the time.
If anything, the furie in this movie is a representation of Alecto, goddess of unceasing anger, due to her dedication that goes beyond the death of those who wrong her. In the mythology, the furies are three sisters who live in the underworld, specifically Erebus(meaning darkness), which is why it’s appropriate to have this movie mostly at night and involve the criminal underworld. Whenever an action movie involves the criminal underworld as a setting, they are mirroring the underworld of mythology in a form of katabasis, a journey into the underworld. Think of something like Orpheus or Dante or Jesus making a trip into the underworld in order to achieve a goal. The underworld in this case is always related to something like a wilderness or a hedonistic primitive state of mind that’s full of everything unlawful because the primitive state is before society and order is established.
The male enters the underworld to become enlightened and the female lives there because it’s their domain.
Rape, murder, theft, drug use, kidnapping, everything that we are able to do as humans but only do once our shadow has taken over. The shadow, the darkness within us, is what is so present in the underworld that the entire world is enveloped in darkness, under this shadow. When taken symbolically, this movie works beautifully and it makes sense to have the evil villain kidnap the child of our tiger mother heroine and also try to harvest her organs. This villain, named Thanh Soi, appears to be something like a big bad wolf who goes around and devours children. Being a female antagonist, she represents the ruthless underworld and chaos that causes the world to be so treacherous and causes the tiger mother to be so dedicated.
I have nothing but praise for this first movie because it sticks so close to mythology and fits itself into an alchemical form of storytelling. It’s no surprise this movie was nominated for awards and it probably would have won a lot of them if people respected the beautiful choreography and neon noir aesthetics. I would even go far enough to say that it’s one of my favorite action movies of the decade, if not in the top 10 of all time. It provides a female action heroine in a way that works because she is entirely feminine in her approach to everything, down to her not really having a hero’s journey because that’s reserved for the male assistant she has, who is in the form of a detective.
Sadly, thanks to the colors pink and purple always being present in these neon noir movies, we have encountered a massive issue in how these kinds of movies will be made in the future.
For a quick reminder, noir is the film genre where a cynical hero enters an existentialist journey that changes them for the worst because they were touched by the darkest elements of the world. In noir, the femme fatale always aids in bringing this male hero to his downfall, because the femme fatale is a representation of Lilith and this existential crisis our hero enters represents the fallen state of Adam. These stories are aided by German expressionism and poetic realism, to both ground and extend the story into an almost surreal world that we can relate to. The inner mind of the hero gets reflected out onto the world to cause this expressionism, which allows aspects like elongated shadows and warped environments to symbolically fit into the story and make it look fascinating.
Neo-noir is a postmodernist form of this genre that takes some of the aspects of noir and tries to experiment with more current trends, keeping some of the aesthetics and aspects that resulted from decades of pulp stories being told and merged together in what I would like to call “mental slop” that is created in media by merging elements together after years of experimentation and deconstruction. No longer does it have to do with a cynical hero or an existential crisis, because now the barriers of the genre are removed and people simply recognize it as noir for some vague aspects that might relate to noir, such as dealing with a criminal underworld or the snappy way hardboiled dialogue would be written.
A good way to put it is that neo-noir holds noir “themes” and “sensibilities”.
This is further continued into neon noir, which is not a fully established genre quite yet, but is noticed recently with the increased popularity of retrowave and cyberpunk. The neon lights of the 80s are brought into this neo-noir story to create a contrast between two colors, similar to how noir was filmed in black and white. This is an aesthetic choice and is usually in the form of contrasting purple against a blue because these are complimentary colors. Lights are very present in this new genre, but the light is less of a source of clarity and more like a new form of obscurity. The expressionism in these movies are used for mood enhancing, due to the tranquility of blue and the excitement of red.
All of this is important to note because postmodernists will take everything that works about these factors and then try to avoid anything that makes sense about it. They go by whatever they feel and hope their experimentation doesn’t blow up in their face. Sometimes it works, like in the case of the movie Drive, and other times it doesn’t like in the sequel to Furie called Furies.
Everything was set up for this sequel. There was no way for it to be worse. It had more money, it had Hollywood investing in it, and the concept of the tiger mother can be used as much as any typical action hero setup could be used. Just have a villain who runs a crime syndicate, have a person who was wronged by this crime lord, they seek out revenge, and it ends with the villain being defeated.
Simple, right?
Well… this movie didn’t do that. I mean, it did, but it didn’t in the way that works. There’s a villain, a male drug lord who runs a casino and kidnaps women to sell their bodies for sex. There is a person who is wronged, who is a woman that lost her husband and child at the hands of this drug lord. This woman is seeking revenge and she defeats the villain at the end.
But she’s not the protagonist. She’s not even A protagonist. In fact, they made her the actual villain of the story. The villain… kills the villain. They probably thought they were doing a “Darth Vader killing off the Emperor” kind of thing, but they weren’t.
We are told in the beginning that this woman is to be like a mentor, the fairy godmother who protects our protagonist and guides her through this treacherous world. She’s meant to be a sort of adopted tiger mother, the way lesbians do it, and instead turns into the wicked stepmother by the end. But it seems I’m getting ahead of myself, so I’ll explain this story in a more coherent manner.
This sequel is a prequel. It happens before the first movie. We are introduced to a character named Bi(pronounced like BEE) who claims in a monologue that she was “destined for darkness”. Hey, makes sense. The Furies were born from Nyx in one of the mythologies, so being born from night to be destined for darkness is a sort of match made in heaven for this kind of character.
She becomes a homeless wreck after a drunk man tries to rape her and killed her mother. She killed him and is forever reminded of that moment every time she gets blood on her hands(a running theme we will see later). This is where a lady named Jacqueline finds her and brings her under her wing, hiding her with two other girls. Symbolically, we can determine these three girls are meant to be the furies: Alecto (“Unceasing in Anger”), Tisiphone (“Avenger of Murder”), and Megaera (“Jealous”).
Already, this entire thing fell apart and deviated from the mythology.
I say this because the other two girls are nothing like the furies of mythology and I can only assume Bi is meant to be Tisiphone because her mother was murdered. But she already got her revenge, so there’s not much for her to do in that regard. The girl named Hong is meant to be a cute Harley Quinn style psycho and the girl Thanh Soi is meant to be a butch biker. The two girls want their own forms of revenge against the drug lord that runs the streets they live in, mostly because both used to be slave girls and want to free their fellow women who have been enslaved. Jacqueline convinced them that she wants to free the slave girls as well, and all of this training that she puts them through is for this mission, but there’s a catch.
Jacqueline kept her relationship with this drug lord secret, because she was working with him and ended up having her husband and child killed by this drug lord. For years, she planned out revenge and set up several spies within his ranks, including the boyfriend of Hong. All of this is revealed in the end, so we go through the whole movie believing they are out for vigilante justice against crimes, specifically against women, when it was all because a bitter mother was betrayed after trusting a man too much. Already, this sounds like a mess, and it is. This prequel makes such a simple story incredibly convoluted and tries to use twists as a plaster for weak narrative and symbol subversion. But there’s a reason for this.
The woman who acted as the main heroine in the first movie also plays the role of Jacqueline. These are two different women in the movie’s setting, being played by the same woman. On top of that, the first movie was directed by a man and now this prequel is written and directed by… this same actress in question, Veronica Ngo. That’s right, she decided to play the villain after she wrote the script and directed the entire thing.
It was designed for this woman to crank herself silly.
And boy does it show in the movie. Quite literally in every scene. I say this because the first movie held shots for a while and had the simple story unfold slowly, with long moments to settle down and let the beautiful environment sink in. In the prequel, we are supposed to enjoy flashing colors as every scene is cut and edited like a movie trailer. I’m not kidding when I say that.
Every. Single. Scene.
Even the scene where Bi is being raped by a drunkard is treated like a movie trailer, with the camera changing all over the place and music playing as she monologues about how everything sucks. This camera is a massive pain to sit through, because it’s either constantly moving, getting splashed with CGI blood, zooming over people’s shoulders, or switching between 5 different conversations before a single thought could be finalized. It does that thing where someone is talking in a different scene and then a few seconds later the camera goes to where the person is talking, as if the transition was meant to be meaningful, but it would be for any little thing.
This is the sign of someone trying to experiment with things but are completely incompetent in what they’re doing. It gets worse when we enter fight scenes that look like they were edited frame by frame to hide the fact that they didn’t know what they wanted the fights to look like. The only time a camera holds for longer than a second is when someone dies off screen or Bi starts to suffer from her PTSD. And boy does she suffer.
They have a moment where she kills a random goon, gets blood on her hands, and when they return to their hideout, she vomits in the sink. She gets flashbacks to her first assault and the day her mother dies, which results in her trying to fight Thanh when she tries to calm Bi down. They fight in the bathroom and one of them knocks a valve loose, which causes the shower to turn on and shower both of them as they try to grapple and fall to their knees. This moment is meant to be a loving embrace between sisters during a time of need and support, with Thanh being a protective sister who is dedicated in making sure the new sister is able to get through harsh mental anguish whenever she is triggered.
This, my friend, is the entire problem with this movie.
I understand it’s meant to be emotional and heartfelt. I don’t deny there is thought put behind a moment like this. The music swells, the colors are somber, the water slowly falls on them as if to say the water purifies their thoughts and cools their head. I get it. But what the hell does any of that have to do with being a fury?
This isn’t about taking vengeance, this all feminist woes being presented for the sake of representation. Hong later on has a birthday party and they all celebrate by singing 90s songs(because this movie is meant to take place in the 90s) and when Bi came into the picture they had a makeover montage. This is an action movie written like a teen romcom without the romance and nothing in it is meant to be comedic. There are light hearted moments, sure, but I would never call it a comedy except for this one moment where a drug addict begs for drugs and the drug lord throws it on the ground for him to snort it, and then the drug lord pisses all over him.
To me, that is funny, but it’s treated as a horrible moment to make us hate the villain who doesn’t even really do anything. One of the most disappointing moments is when the furies sneak into a bedroom with him by disguising themselves as club whores and they have the perfect moment to kill him. Bi messes up by being too obvious with her stab attack and he runs away with a slight wound. This is where we have a fight that is meant to be a key moment: a hallway decorated with silhouettes of dancing women as the place fills up with black suited goons.
This moment is meant to show how brave and powerful the girls are, and all it does is accidentally present a massive stereotype where women can't get the job done and they are granted luxuries by having beautiful bodies while wearing a lot of makeup. When I saw this, I figured at least the action scenes will make up for the lack of theme, and… boy was I wrong.
These action scenes, as I said before, are a mess. Everything is a close up so we can’t see what’s going on and every attack is a wide swing that gets blocked by an arm that comes up 5 seconds too early. There is this back and forth that happens with each fight that makes it look functional and the music keeps it pumping, but it always looks like the fight coordinador told them to do everything wrong as a joke and the director was none the wiser. There are even moments where they use the wrong sound effect, like when someone gets punched and it does the stabbing sound effect.
Sure these are tiny technical things, but it gets worse when I am forced to mention the infamous bike scene.
So, Hong dies at the hands of this guy called Son, who is meant to be the dragon below the drug lord. Her boyfriend sees it, with her boyfriend acting as a spy who has infiltrated the drug lord’s ranks, so he’s standing there shocked and everyone ignores him. The remaining two sisters decided to run away on a bike and ensue in a chase sequence that is some of the worst CGI fighting I’ve seen in a while. There was no reason for any of this, they just put it in because the director thought it would look cool. I have no idea what it is with women and motorcycle chases, but there’s something where a woman on a motorcycle is seen as a “sexy” thing, specifically for women.
Not sexy to be sexual, but it’s something that women find aesthetically pleasing, and I can only imagine that it has something to do with the feeling of a bike vibrating between their legs. It also has to do with the idea of danger, because it’s easier to fall off a motorcycle than it is to fall out of a car with the doors closed. That, and I think it’s a fantasy for women to actually ride them without crashing. It’s the director’s way of saying “See! Women can ride motorcycles too!”, as if refraining from instantly crashing is an achievement.
But considering these are women and they are Asian, the fact they are not crashing instantly is a miracle.
What makes it funny is that in order to say “women can ride motorcycles too”, they put these women on a motorcycle and then transition it into a CGI race through the city with the motorcycle sitting in place in front of a greenscreen. We can easily tell this is happening because the wheels aren’t moving and there is the world’s fakest looking background flying by with whacky angles and movements being made with the camera. Bad guys fly into the screen from behind like TIE fighters in the old Star Wars movies, clearly breaking through the scenery, and I could not stop laughing at how terrible it all looked. And they somehow managed to make it worse by having a moment where one of the girls gets knocked off the bike and the other keeps riding to go up a ramp and onto a roof, only to get knocked off the bike herself and the bike flies off the roof and explodes in a corner.
I think I forgot to mention this but EVERYTHING EXPLODES in this movie. It’s as if the direct thought “hey, this part doesn’t have much substance to it, let’s fill it up with explosions.” There’s even a part earlier where they light a building on fire because it was a place where girls were being held captive. They throw lighters in random areas that have lamp oil or alcohol conveniently placed for them and random areas of the building start blowing up. What are you guys lacing in your cocaine over there, nitroglycerin?
Finally, we come back to the ending, the part of the story that ruined it for the movie. Bi and Thanh go to the drug lord’s hideout, they seek revenge for their lost sister, and meanwhile we have Hong’s boyfriend kill Son because… he was her boyfriend and had sex with her. Way to go movie, that sure shows what men care for. We only fight for those we bang and the sex was really that important for him. Forget meaningful things like a firmly built relationship or a child being made between a man and a woman, those aren’t important to a man. It’s all about the dedication someone has to a girl who sold her body for money.
But you know what? His motives and story aren’t important because we don’t even really see him. In fact, they bring in several characters that we’ve never seen before and act as if we’re supposed to know them. This is when they enter the drug lord’s underground casino, with the casino representing a massive gamble that this entire mission has been taking. However, the concept of gambling doesn’t mean much since the story repeatedly hits us with talk about fate, which is meant to relate to the sisters of fate in Greek mythology. I thought we were going to get some kind of motif going on every time they mentioned fate, but they just said “this is our fate” and that was it.
So they enter the casino and start shooting up the place. I don’t know what guns they are using, but they have enough ammo in their magazines to practically be infinite. There’s even an editing flub where they were supposed to show one of the girls reload, but they just show her pulling the slide back to load a bullet in the chamber, as if that’s enough. At least this part of the movie tries to implement gun-fu, but the way they do it is surreal because it’s entirely for show and there’s nothing practical in any of their attacks. They come with limited ammo and see themselves outnumbered, but they end up shooting people in the hands and feet while fighting as a way to ease off some attacks, to then shoot the enemy in the head.
Fast forward a bit and we have one of the stupidest twists enacted on screen. Jacqueline came with the girls to finish this once and for all, and while fighting she is seen getting stabbed in the back by a henchman. The drug lord watches it happen on a CCTV and celebrates. This looks like a perfect time for Bi to get her revenge on the main villain. But no, that would be the smart thing to do.
Instead, they have Bi and Thanh held at gunpoint in a room after a surprisingly difficult fight against a crackhead armed with a syringe who walked up to them like a zombie, and no I am not making that up. It sounds stupid, because it is, but they put that into the movie because someone decided it would be a good time to include something zombie related in a movie that has nothing to do with zombies. So, they’re held at gunpoint and then Jacqueline barges in and shoots the drug lord’s limbs to make sure he suffers. The boyfriend of Hong also comes in and is like “yeah, let’s get our revenge on this sick bastard”.
Then Jacqueline shoots the boyfriend of Hong. Everyone in the room is like “what the hell is going on?!” and Jacqueline kills off the drug lord and goes “Ok, now Thanh has to kill Bi” and both of them are just as confused as the audience. Even if Jacqueline was this new villain who becomes the new drug lord, it’s not like either of the girls would join her if she continued the sex trade. So, Thanh does the expected and tries to shoot Jacqueline instead, but was too slow and gets shot herself. The final fight is between Jacqueline and Bi, with Bi shooting Jacqueline several times.
But this is the part that made me really pissed: they fire the same gun over 30 times without reloading and then the second the gun is trained on Bi’s head… it’s empty.
The only way for this to be more convenient for Bi is if a bird flew in and airdropped a white turd into the eye of Jacqueline and had it explode for good measure. But because that didn’t happen, we have Bi tired as all hell and she collapses in a room full of dead bodies. Police come in and find her alive, arrest her, and then imprison her for 15 years. The big twist of this, the reason this is a prequel is revealed in this single moment where we see her leave her jail cell.
Who was Bi this whole time?
She was the villain of the first movie: Thanh Soi.
Apparently, the name is meant to be something like “she-wolf” and she took the name in honor of her dedicated sister in battle, Thanh Soi. This means that this entire time, the one we’re to be rooting for ends up being this horrible monster from the first movie that was kidnapping children and harvesting their organs. All because she… didn’t like to get blood on her hands.
If you think that none of this makes sense: welcome to the club.
The first movie was brilliant and coherent all the way down to a mythological level. It hit us deep in our unconscious and is something to be remembered years after watching it for how heartfelt each scene was made. It even brought some sympathy to some of the villains with how one of them was spared by the tiger mother because the guy’s own mother was present. It followed a theme of motherhood, while the second movie tried to follow a theme of sisterhood.
Where motherhood was filled with morals and justice, the sisterhood was filled with contradictions and partying.
I do not believe this was done out of a lack of budget or a rushed job. This was the result of how wokeness infiltrates even some of the least western influenced countries to create senseless garbage that nobody likes. We are not only to sympathize with one villain, but we are told that we have to sympathize with two, while the male villains are completely reprehensible. This movie was designed with woke Charlie’s Angels in mind and it shows with how they took three women to fight for a mentor and the only male on the team is treated like a bag of meat. What makes it more hilarious for me is that I’m constantly told by the woke that it’s bad to give women tragic backstories for why they become villains and there’s no excuse for having rape as part of this tragic backstory.
This is the feminism that is designed to trigger western feminists while hoping that Hollywood accepts it as “feminist enough”. This movie was not designed with men in mind, because female action movies are always plagued with over edited fight scenes, girl power moments, and romcom montages. I wish I was kidding, but I have yet to see a female focused action movie that refrained from doing these pointless representation calls, because the goal is to represent in this way.
She Hulk, Charlie's Angels, feminist Ghost Busters, Men in Black International, Atomic Blonde, Captain Marvel, Gunpowder Milkshake, Lucy, Jupiter Ascending, Disney Star Wars, basically every Disney and Pixar movie now. All of these movies are designed specifically to say women can do stuff guys can and then fail to show them doing stuff guys can. Then they wonder why these movies flop and get memed into oblivion. The only people who care about seeing a woman beating up men are angry women, because that is a low resolution view of what the movie is even supposed to say. The only people begging to see that on screen are women who hate men enough to want to beat them up.
This is not a lot of people. This is surprisingly a small fraction of the population and this is who these movies are trying to appeal to. Everything else around this low resolution declaration is meant to be spectacle for the sake of spectacle.
Why did the motorcycle explode? Because explosions are cool.
Why did the girls light a building on fire? Because fire is cool and it leads to explosions.
Why are they shooting the limbs of people? Because shooting limbs is cool.
Why does the camera get covered in CGI blood every 5 seconds? Because blood splatters are cool.
I’m not going to sit here and say something like that lacks style. It has style and it is spectacular. But when placed in a movie with zero meaning and zero purpose, this baseless spectacle gets lost in a sea of nonsense and there’s nothing to hold onto other than the possible impressive choreography or the impressive practical effects. This movie had a little bit of something, but it could never hold a candle to the dedication and effort put into the first movie. I also want to mention the camera work because this is also tied into woke ideology.
Every time the plot is trying to be expressed or shown, the camera and scenes are given the smallest amount of lingering. For example, a turf war begins after they blow up the slave holding… place and it’s shown as a turf war in two events. A person gets shot and people start getting attacked by random. These events lasted for about 5 seconds each. We’re told that Bi is homeless and fighting the local gang by having her steal a wallet and then have someone shout “hey, this is our turf!” all in the span of 5 seconds. We go from the girls going through an outfit montage during a plan to the girls working at the club of the drug lord in about 5 seconds.
If you didn’t get it by now: everything in this movie goes by the 5 second rule, but only when it is about the plot.
Do you want to know what lasts longer than 5 seconds? Moments where the girls are talking about stuff they like and parts where they pose together to present girl power. So to the woke, it takes the tiniest amount of time to show how someone enters the worst stage of their life, but it takes minutes to let us know that these girls plan to stick together and fight side by side. Everything important is done with quick flashes and everything unimportant is lingered on. This is a tactic of the woke to bring the mundane into the essential.
The goal is to feature tiny bits of important things to let the viewer understand why they are in that position, and then hammer in the idea of wokeness that the director or writer wanted to virtue signal for. The woke do not dedicate their focus on the themes of the story that matter to the audience and instead force the viewer to put up with things the woke writer is focused on so that the propaganda is viewed in the first place. We are promised a story about a mother seeking revenge and instead we are treated with the rise of a villain who became that way because she was abused as a child.
Using the woke lens of intersectionality and critical feminist theory, we can determine that the themes of this movie dwindled into arbitrary concepts like PTSD and girls trying to stay friends till the end. All of these are the result of mental weakness and toxic behavior that is now being given an excuse because the context of why they do these toxic actions are presented, even if it’s for 5 seconds. Now a woman like Bi is able to be excused for harvesting the organs of children and even blame men because it all started when her mother was a prostitute and a random drunk guy raped her. This is the polar opposite from how a tiger mother acts, because we are not trying to give excuses for a dedicated mother doing what a dedicated mother does. The tiger mother is a big part of what causes us to survive and is something to strive for because that’s what allows us to reproduce.
Being raped and then suffering PTSD over it doesn’t.
Thanks to intersectionality, the woke demand to present vices as virtuous and weakness as strength because this is how they take the outliers and bring them to the center. This goes beyond postmodernist subjectivity. It becomes subjective advocacy to obfuscate reality itself and pretend it’s incoherent just because their own agenda is incoherent. This is why every time there is a rule, they will pretend there is an exception to it, just because they don’t understand what that rule is or it’s not detailed in a way that prevents horribly bad faith takes. Every established rule for writing established doesn’t have an exception, just an attempt to reject what’s actually effective. These rules were established because they work and because people respond to them positively.
The woke hate positive results because those are the results that signify the rules work.
I don’t mind a female lead in a movie. I also don’t mind when a female lead is in an action movie. I don’t even mind a sisterhood or girls having magic powers or anything like that. Those things make sense to me when they are done properly, which the movie Furie did when they had the tiger mother as the protagonist and a harvester of child organs as the antagonist. That makes 100% sense to me, both symbolically and entertainment wise.
What I don’t like is when wokeness barges into established IPs and tries to change everything to say absolutely nothing of value. I’ve noticed that these feminist and LGBT stories always try to deal with the same nonsense that is done in a sad attempt to connect with some sort of audience they have in mind. Sexual abuse, PTSD, feeling oppressed, mental disorders, spousal abuse, prostitution, sexual deviancy, leaving their family to be with a sexual partner, drug abuse, being found by a guardian lesbian to feel protected, entering a sisterhood or a group of fellow LGBT agents of destruction.
These types of stories don’t mean anything to normal people. We can see some of these things as a terrible thing to have happen and we can attach a negative symbol to these things, but there’s no way in hell a person who’s never experienced any of this feels represented. The representation of a minority, that just wants to claim oppression because of their own choices or because of something that rarely happens, is a losing game. Normal people will either hate it or not care. I have every reason to blame the director for these horrible decisions and I have every reason to claim her poor decisions are because she fell for woke nonsense as a woman.
But no matter what, I refuse to let such an issue deter me from liking the first movie, even though she’s the main actress. The people featured in a story mean nothing to the story outside of how well they can act the part and be the character. Now we even have to say that the actor must retain the source material and culturally make sense, all because the woke want to bring the outliers to the center and turn every Disney character black. Especially the red heads. I only covered the feminist aspect of wokeness here, so we can leave woke race swapping for another time.
Furie is an amazing movie that will be remembered positively for years to come.
Furies is woke trash that will only be remembered for how terrible it was.

I get what the AI was going for with the Nissa ones, but sadly the Liliana one ended up looking less like Elvira and more like Morticia Adams... Still neat though.

My skin is itching like crazy. Took my M shot on Saturday, and today it’s been all over body itching and burning. Feels like poison ivy or something. I’ve never had a reaction like this. I’m been on the same 2.5mg for 4 months. I’m now 127 pounds. I’m wondering if this is a sign to stop. My injection site usually itches but now it’s all over. I just took a Benadryl. Any other suggestions? I soaked in epson salts and that didn’t help. I have no rash just terrible itching. Nothing in my environment or diet has changed. M is the only medication I’m on.

Khary Payton as Lucius Fox
Logan Lerman as Dick Grayson/Robin I
Sadie Sink as Carrie Kelly/Robin II
Emily Bett Rickards as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl (With a ginger dye job, of course)
Woody Harrelson as Harvey Bullock
Christine Adams as Leslie Thompkins
Jim Parsons as Edward Nygma/Riddler
John Goodman as Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin
Leonardo DiCaprio as Harvey Dent/Two-Face
Rihanna as Selina Kyle/Catwoman
Giancarlo Esposito as Victor Fries/Mr. Freeze
Oscar Isaac as Bane (With him looking like his normal self when not on Venom and turning into a CGI Hulk-sized thing voiced and mocapped by Isaac whenever he juices up)
Bryce Dallas Howard as Pamela Isley/Poison Ivy
Jamie Campbell-Bower as Johnathan Crane/Scarecrow
Bryan Cranston as Hugo Strange
Mads Mikkelsen as Kirk Langstrom/Man-Bat
Matt Damon as Tommy Elliott/Hush
Tom Hardy as Basil Karlo/Clayface
Ben Kingsley as Ras' Al Ghul
Jessica Henwick as Talia Al Ghul
Dave Bautista as Solomon Grundy
Angela Bassett as Nora Fries

I have once again tried to put together all issues released this week, that I knew would feature queer characters based on the regular cast or the solicits (This list is subject to change as the issues come out).
Marvel: * Betsy Braddock: Captain Britain #2 feat. Betsy Braddock ^bi & Rachel Summers ^sapphic (by Tini Howard & Vasco Georgiev) * Strange Academy: Finals #5 feat. Zoe ^sapphic & Dessy ^sapphic (by Skottie Young & Humberto Ramos)
DC: * Batman: Gotham Knights - Gilded City #6 feat. Tim Drake ^bi (by Evan Narcisse & Abel) * Harley Quinn #28 feat. Harley Quinn ^bi (by Erica Henderson, Tini Howard & Sweeney Boo) * Tim Drake: Robin #7 feat. Tim Drake ^bi (by Meghan Fitzmartin & Ricardo Lopez Ortiz)
If you have another issue of a queer superhero comic from this week, that you want to talk about, just write a comment below and I will add it to the list.
Have fun!

Princeton: climb into the tiger’s area at the zoo and fight with the tigers for food. If you survive, your chance increases to 44%.
Yale: Yell as loud as you can the phrase: Yale don’t fail me! Otherwise I will wail!
Cornell: eat as much corn as you can. For every corn you eat, your chance increases by 0.01 %!
Brown: Roll in the mud while worshipping brownies. Make sure to go to your mom’s kitchen and smear mud all over the floor she just cleaned for a bonus 20% chance increase.
Penn: Smear pen ink all over an econ teacher. For every econ teacher you smear ink on, your chance increases by 4%.
Fartmouth: go get a dart and shoot it in any mouth.
Colombia: memorize the whole tiktok song and sing it in front of the next relative that asked you what college you got into.
Harvard: go find a poison ivy and cut it in the shape of a clover. Be sure to do it without gloves!
NEU: cure cancer.

I’m left even more disappointed by the Bumblebee kiss.
Harley Quinn is raunchy as all get out, but damn if I don’t love her and Poison Ivy together there.
Please, watch that show instead. If you want to see characters in a relationship, that, THAT is what we need more of.

Taped show tonight

• Battle Royale for Final spot in NXT North American Ladder March at S&D - Dijak, Jinder Mahal, Xyon Quinn, Dabba-Kato, Scrypts, Apollo Crews, Dante Chen, Damon Kemp, Charlie Dempsey, Drew Gulak, Edris Enofe, Malik Blade, Odyssey Jones, Bryson Montana, Quincy Elliott, Javier Bernal, Oro Mensah, Axiom, Nathan Frazier and Hank Walker.
  
• Tyler Bate versus Von Wagner
  
• Elektra Lopez versus Valentina Feroz
  
• Eddy Thorpe versus Myles Borne
  
• Indi Hartwell versus Ivy Nile versus Sol Ruca (Last Chance match to join NXT Women’s Title Match at S&D)
  
• Brooks and Jensen versus Tony D and Stacks (If country boys win they are added to the three way match at S&D)
  
• Grayson Waller to respond to Jonny Gargano’s challenge