Neil Rush CMT Blog- May 24, 2016- The Most Important Things I Learned This Year

May 24, 2016

Hello, blog readers, this is Neil. This past school year had some unique ups and downs. These are the three things that were probably the most important things I learned in the past school year.
1.) How to, at the very least, lay the groundwork to make a good podcast. Last year, the podcast that I made reviewing Avengers: Age of Ultron that I thought could be the first episode of a film review podcast series that I would make over the course of the summer and maybe beyond was pretty weak. Music ran for too long, parts of audio only went into one ear, and in general, it was a Level 1 podcast.  The podcast that I made this year was better, and yet it still was something I'm not too proud of. Much of the discussion was rushed through, it was a very surface-level look at both BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty (the administrators that were listening to the podcast were even led to believe that they were the same show, which is a sign that I should either only talk about one show at a time or put more clearly defined transitions from one show to another), and due to time constraints, only four out of ten minutes of the podcast have been heard (let's be honest, just because something is able to be heard by many strangers doesn't mean it actually is, and it's not being heard because my Vimeo account has literally no promotion outside of my BCTC classroom). Fortunately, I did learn from these experiences and think that I can now try to make an actual podcast about an actual topic in an actually well-made style. I could start a series relating to one or more of one of my many fandoms (to see what these are, go to my Wix website, which is nrush7396.wix.com, and look at my bio page, or go to my Weebly website, which is concernedalien.weebly.com, and look at my bio page there) or to make a podcast series in similar vein to Sarah Koenig's podcast news show Serial but about local affairs or things happening at BCTC, such as the dress code controversy, but make the podcast series not so much about the dress code itself so much as various student and teacher attitudes towards the dress code and why it matters so much to certain people that a dress code is or isn't in place.
2.) How to make a website. I've actually managed to make three websites- one on Weebly, one on Wix, and one on Wordpress. The Wix one is the one that I use the most because of how the Weebly website doesn't work on BCTC computers and the Wordpress one, which is more of an industrial-quality web blog than a full website, required me to make a new email address because of a leftover blog from a few years ago that I got bored with using, as you're not allowed to have the same email address on more than one blog on Wordpress. The website showcases everything I have made at BCTC and includes a small bio of myself, a list of what my dream projects would be, and a blog of its own which I am currently using to give bios of the main characters of the thing I hope will be my magnum opus, a teens-and-up animated semi-satirical speculative fiction action-comedy-drama I call Fanz. The three websites in question are nrush7396.wix.com, concernedalien.weebly.com, and concernedalien.wordpress.com, if you would like to visit them. Due to lack of both promotion and previous wide acknowledgement, I can't know for sure if people I don't personally know are visiting any of my websites, but for now, I'm OK if only people I'm able to tell about the websites locally and in person are visiting them, because at least that's somebody.
3.) How to stop worrying, do what I love, and love what I do. Life is confusing. People on all different sides are trying to tell you different ideas of right and wrong, making it hard to even trust your own judgement. There is so much to read, write, watch, play, and do, yet so little time to do any of it. People want acceptance from family and friends while being unable to accept differing opinions and behaviors from themselves that their family and friends exhibit. So in the end, the best you can do it sit back, relax, find something or someone you really, really care about, and do something good for it. It's why I like to study fandom behaviors. Fandom is basically religion minus the global political cultural assimilation (though that could easily become a part of it somewhere down the line). It's amazing how the fiction we consume changes how we live in reality. So when life's confusion becomes too much, remember what you identify as a fan of, and do something with it, whether it be reading a book or comic, watching a movie, TV show, or web series, playing with a toy, game, or video game, drawing fan art, writing fan fiction, making a fan film, or in my case, creating an original production that takes influence from what it is you like and what you know and trying to make it into its own media franchise. At the end of the day, just know who and what you are and be proud of it. And if there's something you want to be but aren't sure if you can be it, whether it's a decent jogger, aYouTube Lego critic, the creator of a cartoon, or just a person you can be proud of, remember the words said by the jogging baboon at the end of BoJack Horseman Season 2 (link at the end of the post).
I may or may not use this blog over the summer if I have anything to say that I think is worth saying that hasn't already been said by me on another blog, podcast, or web video, so stay tuned if you're not too busy. Have a good summer, and I'll see you back here this fall for my final year at Berks Career and Uniform Center- I mean Technology Center. (All jokes aside, this is a very good school with good educators teaching me very good and useful skills.)

BoJack Horseman Episode 212 Final Scene

Neil Rush CMT Blog- May 10, 2016- Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub! Why Rick and Morty is the Eighth Best Television Program in the Gigaverse

May 10, 2016

Hello, blog readers, it's Neil again. This week's assignment is to write about our favorite TV show or web show and three reasons why we like it. I've talked about most of my favorite TV shows many times before here, but that's the assignment, so here I go again. I list it as my eighth because my reasons for liking shows 1-7 aren't likely to take up a blog post. Because Rick and Morty is an Adult Swim show, a few heavy and mature thematic topics will be brought up, so reader discretion is somewhat advised. And with that, I present the three reasons why Rick and Morty is the eighth best television program in the gigaverse (the gigaverse is the term I've created for a theoretical universe bubble containing all of the universes. It works like this- Teenyverse<Miniverse<Microverse<Universe<Multiverse<Megaverse<Maxiverse<Gigaverse.)
1.) It's funny. Created by Justin Roiland (an animator-voice actor-comedian-writer-producer-director known for creating the 2005 animated short House of Cosbys and for voicing Oscar on the Disney Channel animated series Fish Hooks, Blendin Blandin on Disney XD's Gravity Falls, and the Earl of Lemongrab and all other "Lemon" characters on Cartoon Network's Adventure Time) and Dan Harmon (creator of the NBC sitcom Community and a writer on the first season of The Sarah Silverman Program) for Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's late-night block meant for ages 18-49, Rick and Morty is an animated science-fiction-fantasy-supernatural-cosmic-horror-action-adventure-black-comedy-drama series based on a series of short films made by Roiland in 2006 called The Adventures of Doc and Mharti, a parody of the Back to the Future films. Having grown tired of being an associate producer of reality television, Roiland submitted the shorts to Channel 101, an animated short film festival ran by Harmon and some of his friends. Because Roiland was hit with a lawsuit from Universal for trying to use the names of Doctor Emmett Brown and Marty McFly in a more tasteful parody, he called Doc Brown just "Doc", changed the spelling of Marty's name, and making the shorts disturbing and graphic out of spite for Universal. Despite the confused reaction of much of the audience, Harmon found promise in Roiland and hoped to work with him more in the future. In 2012, Harmon was fired from his own show, Community, due to public feuds with NBC executives and one of the show's stars, Chevy Chase. Adult Swim saw this as an opportunity to ask him to make a show for them. Initially, Harmon was hesitant, unfamiliar with the creative process of animation and finding Adult Swim not suited for his style of storytelling. He preferred writing stories that blended humor that parodied conventions, cliches, and tropes of nearly every genre and subgenre of entertainment with character development and story depth. Up until around the time Adult Swim probed Harmon, with a few exceptions (Moral Orel, The Venture Bros., The Boondocks, and some episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken), most of Adult Swim's original programming was centered around off-color and surreal humor with not much more under the surface than that, aside from something you could watch while under the influence of mind-altering substances. Most of their other shows were either syndicated reruns of Family Guy, American Dad, The Cleveland Show, King of the Hill, and Bob's Burgers or imported anime on the Toonami block. Keith Crawford and Mike Lazzo, the two men who run Adult Swim and Williams Street, clearly were interested in producing a prime-time show for a wider audience than most of their other original programming and were fans of Community, taking pity on Harmon after he was fired from his own show that was now being ran by people that didn't understand the characters like he did and after pilots for original sitcoms that CBS and Fox wanted him to write for them were not picked up (because Harmon straight-up didn't care about those shows like he did Community and would eventually come to care about Rick and Morty and he was busy taking his podcast, Harmontown, on tour across America and playing Dungeons and Dragons with his friends on the podcast. The CBS and Fox shows didn't even have clear premises, aside from they had Dan Harmon's name on them and they were supposed to be distributed by CBS Television Distribution and Twentieth Century Fox Television, respectively). To get help with making a show for Adult Swim, Harmon contacted Roiland, who had tried to get a show that was a heavily sanitized reimagining of his Doc and Mharti shorts approved as a pilot for Fox's Sunday night animated block. Roiland didn't like how the only way he could get it approved for Fox would be if he removed the hard science fiction elements present and just made it about a grandpa being a bad influence on his teenage grandson while a single mom tries to keep it all together. Fox apparently was only OK with unrealistic occurrences in their prime-time cartoons if they serviced one-off gags, as they often do in Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, and the work of Seth MacFarlane, and feared that it would alienate mainstream audiences if the show was centered around such bizarre things, blaming that for Futurama's initial cancellation (completely unaware of the fact that they were constantly putting it on at bad times). Roiland believed that if you go into animation, you deserve the right to make your show as crazy and ridiculous as you can imagine, and after receiving the call from Harmon, they got together and wrote a pilot, doing things such as renaming the characters Doc and Mharti to Rick and Morty, making Rick Morty's grandfather to better justify a connection between the two of them than the inexplicable connection between Doc Brown and Marty in Back to the Future, and building a family around the two characters to create some emotional grounding. Adult Swim approved the pilot along with more scripts. The show became something like this- Rick Sanchez (voiced by Justin Roiland) is an eighty-year-old, alcoholic, mentally ill, and narcissistic-on-the-outside-self-loathing-on-the-inside scientist who has been back in his family's life for some time now after spending the past twenty years traveling through space and to other dimensions engaging in pseudoscience, criminal activities, and hedonism. He brings his fourteen-year-old grandson Morty Smith (also voiced by Roiland) on many of his adventures partially because of a rule affecting all other versions of Rick and Morty across the multiverse that the presence of a Morty cloaks Rick's DNA from his enemies and partially because Morty is pretty weak-willed (at least when the show begins) and will just let Rick take him wherever and constantly endanger him. Morty is an awkward and nervous teenage boy with no real friends aside from those in his family and, to an extent, his high school crush Jessica (voiced by Kari Walgren). Initially, Jessica just thinks that Morty is a sweet and cute boy, but later on, she shows signals that she may like Morty back romantically. Morty's mom and Rick's daughter, Beth Smith (nee Sanchez) (voiced by Sarah Chalke) is a horse-heart surgeon that, on the surface, seems like your typical stressed-out wife and mother who greatly admires her father as many daughters do. However, she is later revealed to be a pretty dark deconstruction of this type of character. She has an unrealistic ideal of human superiority, partially stemming from shame for only being a B-student in medical school and having to "settle" for becoming a veterinary equine heart surgeon rather than a highly-respected human-heart surgeon. This is why she allows her father to put her son in dangerous situations- because while she knows very deep down that Rick isn't a very good person, she prefers him over her mother because he was more "remarkable" than her mother, even if in Rick's case, "remarkable" means "sociopath that holds his entire species in contempt simply because they aren't all like him". Beth also believes that if Rick weren't around, Morty would turn out just like her husband, Jerry Smith (voiced by Chris Parnell), whom she holds in contempt for being something of a beta-male. Jerry is confusing. Depending on the episode and writer, he's either a sympathetic Charlie Brown type that you want to see things go better for despite nothing ever going his way or an unlikeable weasel of a man who lets his insecurities make him do extremely selfish, cowardly, or ignorant things. In some episodes, he's both of these things. I would probably like him more if he wasn't voiced by Chris Parnell. Or if Chris Parnell didn't voice the Progressive Box in commercials for the aforementioned car insurance company. Or both. Jerry and Beth only stay together because of a daughter they had out of wedlock when Beth was seventeen. This daughter is named Summer Smith (voiced by Spencer Grammer, Kelsey Grammer's oldest daughter). Summer is Morty's seventeen-year-old older sister that, in the first few episodes, is your typical rude teenager with an attitude of wanting to be anywhere other than wherever she currently is, valuing her phone above almost all else, and having an unhealthy obsession with high school popularity. Later on, she joins Rick and/or Morty on adventures and is more willing to stand up to Rick when she doesn't agree with what he says and does and acts more competent than Morty, becoming a bonafide action heroine. Most people will come for the humor, dark and gross as it often is. My selected funny moments are these- S1E06 "Rick Potion #9"- After Morty asks Rick to make him a love potion to get Jessica to fall in love with him at the annual Flu Season Dance, it actually works. Unfortunately, Jessica has a mild case of the flu, causing her to spread the effects of the love potion until everyone at school (and I mean EVERYONE, aside from biological relatives) to fall in love with Morty, and later everyone on Earth falls in love with Morty. S1E09 "Something Ricked This Way Comes"- After spending the episode in a conflict with a human-form version of the Devil named Mr. Needful (voiced by Alfred Molina), Rick and Summer grow buff bodies for themselves and beat Mr. Needful senseless as he tries to give an Apple-style presentation for his Facebook-parody company. Rick and Summer then go beat up a few more easy-target bullies, set to "X Gon Give It To Ya" by rapper DMX. S2E07 "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez"- Rick makes a teenage clone of himself and sends his consciousness into it so that he can feel youthful. The old Rick's personality, however, is trapped in the younger clone, whose adolescent personality seems to want to take Rick over permanently, and the only way the real Rick can communicate his desire to be free is through various things resembling teen angst, such as singing a song, creating a drawing, and doing a dance about it. "Tiny Rick" has become the most popular "kid" in school, so all of the kids that follow Tiny Rick think he's just expressing himself and can't possibly know what he really means. This leads him to make a song-and-dance routine at the next school dance. Tiny Rick's song goes like this- "Let me out! Let me out! This is not a dance! I'm beggin' for help! I'm screamin' for help! Please come let me out! I'm dying in a vat in the garage!" And nearly the entire rest of the school gets in on singing and dancing to this with Tiny Rick. These are just a few of the laugh-out-loud hilarious moments of the show.
2.) It's an emotional roller coaster. Other shows on Adult Swim have tried to add more emotional pathos to their stories in the past with varied results. Moral Orel began as an off-color parody of shows like Davey and Goliath and Leave it to Beaver before eventually becoming a thoughtful mediation on the positives and negatives of religious faith. The Venture Bros. began as a parody of Jonny Quest before becoming a harsh analysis of masculine failure. The Boondocks is probably the most cynical, blunt, and unforgiving show from the African-American perspective ever put on television, equally hard on people of color that promote a culture of a lack of self-respect as it is on Caucasians that continue to keep the lower class down. Rick and Morty, however, tried going for a more universal sad theme. The five main characters are deconstructions of common sitcom archetypes- Rick of the wacky grandpa, Morty of the socially awkward teenage son, Jerry of the bumbling sitcom dad, Summer of the bratty teenage daughter, and Beth of the stressed-out mom. They show the common traits of these archetypes coming from a high level of selfishness and narcissism on the outside and self-loathing on the inside- knowing you're doing something bad yet continuing to do it because it's what you're good at. The family continues to stay together despite knowing that they are not good for each other because of general willful ignorance and knowing that their lives wouldn't be much better even if things were different. In S1E08 "Rixty Minutes", Jerry, Beth, and Summer look at the lives of other versions of themselves on a pair of interdimensional goggles and learn that Jerry and Beth are more successful in the universes in which they never married and never had Summer, with Jerry as a world-famous actor, screenwriter, and director and Beth as the human-heart surgeon she always wanted to be. Furious and distraught that the very fact that she's alive is why her parents are unhappy, Summer prepares to run away to New Mexico and "do something with turquoise". Morty manages to stop her by explaining a lesson he learned from his adventures with Rick- "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?" This is supposed to mean that you shouldn't dwell on what might have been and abandon your family because of uncertainty of your own existence. Things aren't going to be perfect no matter what happens. Nearly everything that happens to anyone is a chance encounter, so no other universe matters other than the one you live in. Jerry and Beth learn this shortly afterwards after seeing the Jerry of one of the universes he was more successful in have a creator meltdown and have a slow-moving chase with the police on a moped while his head is partially shaved and drives all the way to Beth's house and admit that he wishes he married her instead of becoming an actor/screenwriter/director. Upon seeing this happen to their alternate selves, the Jerry and Beth of the main universe decide that they can stay together another day if it means preventing anything like that from happening. The show also looks at other existential concepts, such as the possibility of Rick's pursuit of science being why he is so bad with people, the idea of humans not being all that important in the grand scheme of the universe and that we only think of ourselves as such because, well, we ARE humans (this is underscored by the presence of multiple alien races in the various dimensions and on the various planets in the show), and whether or not a relationship not being with a real person makes it any less valuable, as shown when alien parasites implant memories of themselves as various cartoonish longtime family friends in the heads of the Sanchez-Smiths and how the relationships with the mental creations of the parasites the family have are more satisfying than their relationships with each other. The show looks at social issues such as whether or not being a victim of misogyny can justify misandry (spoiler alert, it doesn't), denial of facts out of an obsessive desire to be right, double standards of sexual assault in situations when it is female-on-male, male-on-male, or female-on-female rather than male-on-female, relative morality and when it is and isn't acceptable to get involved in a conflict you have no personal stake in, the ethics of subjugation as a means of preventing conflict, what makes something a religion versus a mere passion, how to truly define "slavery" and the twisted ways people try to justify it, if communication through the filter of another's comfort keeps people safer, more mentally secure, and from remembering trauma or if it just reinforces and justifies ignorance of the realities of the world and keeps censorship alive, and how much mental and physical abuse one can take before snapping and becoming the very thing they hate the most. This last one was most prominent in S2E09 "Look Who's Purging Now", in a loose parody of the concept of the love-them-hate-them-or-love-to-hate-them social science fiction action horror thriller films in The Purge series. After Rick and Morty get stranded on a "purge planet" on the night of its purge, referred to as "the Festival" by its residents, the one night a year they let out their worst inhibitions by trying to kill one another, they hide out in a lighthouse to wait for power suits to be sent by Summer. The alien cat-man who runs the lighthouse will only let them do that if Morty listens to a draft of a screenplay he wrote. Morty explains that he doesn't like it, thinking that having the second act take place three weeks before the first and third act is not good storytelling. The cat-man, being really obnoxious and unable to take constructive criticism, attempts to force Morty and Rick out of his lighthouse just as the power suits are coming, and, fed up with the cat-man's attitude, Morty shoves him down the lighthouse steps and inadvertently snaps his neck. Morty then takes his power suit and goes on a rampage on the rest of the planet's population, even forcing people out of hiding and attacking people that are already dead, forcing Rick to knock Morty out. Once Morty wakes up and he and Rick are flying off the planet with a new ship they found, Rick lies to Morty to spare him guilt and says that he ate candy bars with a chemical called "Purginol" in them that raises the aggression levels of anyone that eats them to unnatural heights and that's what made him completely lose it, though it is immediately revealed on the candy bar wrappers that they read "Now 100% Purginol Free!", proving that Morty killed those people because of his own pent-up rage at the universe that is extremely unfair to him. This is expected to come back into play in Season 3 this fall, and Morty will be faced with the idea that hanging out with Rick is causing him to lose his moral compass. One of my other favorite dramatic aspects of the show is the possibility that it may be the most realistic take on Asperger's Syndrome in fictional media that I'm inclined to watch. Dan Harmon received praise for "accidentally" making a positive role model for those with Asperger's Syndrome in the form of the character Abed, played by Danny Pudi, on his previous show Community. Initially unfamiliar with the disorder, he looked it up and began to notice traits of Asperger's within himself. He tried not to take them with a whole lot more than a grain of salt, because, as he has said, "if you find a lump on your neck, think it's cancer, and research it on the internet, you're going to find that it's cancer, whether or not it actually is cancer." From there, Harmon began to make the central theme of Community that no one wants to be alone forever, even if they are loners that connect better to fictional people than real ones, and that the relationships we form with our family and friends are what make life worth living. I'm pretty sure that Dan has Asperger's, as it would explain why he's so difficult for many people to work with, his outlandish and self-destructive personality, and the nature of most of the fights he has had with Erin McGathy, his girlfriend from an unknown time in the past to October 2014, when they became engaged and married, and a year later, when they divorced on mutual terms. As revealed in the documentary Harmontown, a documentary about Dan at his best and worst while taking a podcast on tour, McGathy has said a few times the expression "it's not what you said, it's what you did", meaning that it's never the specific things he says that are hurtful, but the intention behind them- Dan feels a need to "win" nearly every conflict he comes into, even with his loved ones, and is reminded of his mother in many of his fights with Erin, whom he had something of a rocky relationship with. In the documentary, he admits this self-loathing aspect of himself while on the verge of tears, ironically while talking about how, in the heat of those moments he's in conflict, he likes knowing that he made his "opponent" cry, and then later wish he were dead for even having that kind of thought and believing that those like Erin deserve better. Dan says that he is the villain of his own story in that regard, and says that his friend and dungeon master for the D&D tournament of his podcast tour, Spencer Crittenden, is the hero, because despite his often introverted nature, Spencer is kind, optimistic, and everything Dan wishes he could be. Anyway, Asperger's in Rick and Morty. It is stated in the pilot that Morty has a learning disability and that Rick has multiple mental illnesses. Morty could easily have Asperger's because of his social awkwardness, introversion, and (initial) optimism. Rick may be a look at the darker traits of Asperger's, the kinds mentioned by Dan earlier- ignoring social norms due to not seeing a practical purpose for them, giving off an attitude of believing he is genuinely better than everyone else in his life, and presenting an attitude of self-hatred just under the surface for knowing that it's in his nature to turn away those he loves. If we're grasping at straws, then any other member of the immediate Sanchez-Smith family could be interpreted as having Asperger's as well. Jerry, Beth, and even Summer all come off as potential candidates primarily because of their respective selfish motivations combined with insecurities and mistrust. If this was the intention of Justin and Dan, then I think that's really good, because I think it's important to show people with Asperger's not merely as awkward or innocently insensitive kids, teens, and young adults that need guidance (Parenthood, Adam, The Bridge), people who value pop culture to a hyper-focused level at the cost of social skills (Community, The Big Bang Theory), pathological narcissists (Silicon Valley), or, probably the worst one, something people only claim to have so that they don't need to abide by conventional manners (Glee, and this is probably one of the main reasons why Dan Harmon hates the show- taking pride in saying that Asperger's is something fake that doesn't deserve sympathy while pretending to be progressive on nearly every other issue known for affecting teenagers in the late 2000s-early-2010s). Sometimes, the insensitivity of people with Asperger's isn't so innocent. And yet this doesn't mean that they are bad people. Everyone is just trying to work hard to better themselves, and it gets easier the more you focus on doing it. OK, back to actual R&M talk. The show has plenty of existential horror stemming from its use of the multiverse as a plot element. There's a near-infinite amount of other versions of you in an infinite amount of other universes. Plenty of them have gone on to become more successful and noteworthy than the you of this universe may ever be, while plenty other versions of you died long before you ever got to wherever you are now, if they were even born at all. No wonder Rick is insane. He's seen himself die several times and doesn't know why he hasn't died yet if so many other Ricks have. I find the three most nightmare-fuel-inducing moments of the show to be these- Almost the entirety of S1E06 "Rick Potion #9" after the love potion goes global. Rick bluntly explains that Morty trying to make Jessica fall in love with him through use of a love potion is essentially the same thing as giving her roofies. Rick tries to use praying mantis DNA to cure humanity of its psychotic attraction to Morty, but that just makes everyone part mantis and want to eat Morty now as well. Rick uses an assortment of DNA from various other animals as the base for a new cure, and while it rids everyone of their attraction to Morty, it turns them all into hideous monstrosities referred to as "Cronenbergs", a reference to David Cronenberg's body-horror films of the 1980s. With no way to reverse the situation, Rick finds a universe in which he and Morty did successfully find a cure and then conveniently died shortly afterwards and decide to take the place of the dead Rick and Morty of that universe. As "Look On Down From The Bridge" by Mazzy Star plays in the background, Morty walks into his "new" house past Jerry and Beth arguing for the umpteenth time, made more sad by the fact that the Jerry and Beth finally did resolve their marriage in the now-abandoned universe thanks to the apocalypse bringing them together, with a thousand-yard-stare on his face. S1E11 "Ricksy Business"- While Rick, Morty, and Summer are throwing an inter-dimensional high school party back home, Jerry and Beth are trying to have a Titanic-themed getaway. Beth just wants to stay in her cabin while Jerry does the things referencing the Titanic film with someone else, though that someone else, Lucy, a maid for the attraction, turns out to be a psychopath who is tired of cleaning up after everyone else that uses the attraction and forces Jerry to do all of the romantic Jack-and-Rose things with her while holding him at gunpoint. At least Beth cares about Jerry just enough to save him from that. S2E05 "Get Schwifty"- The planet is invaded by giant head creatures called Cromulons that create apocalyptic events, teleport Earth to their galaxy, and force them into an intergalactic singing competition in which the losers have their planets blown up. It's the general ominous feel of the Cromulons' presence that makes this one of the creepier episodes. As mentioned before, the show has plenty of tear-jerker moments for a show branded as a "comedy". The biggest ones are probably these- S1E05 "Meeseeks and Destroy", when Morty is crying into Rick's arms shortly after being assaulted by the way-too-creepy Mr. Jellybean (voiced by Tom Kenny, the same guy that voices SpongeBob, for the love of Pete!) in the bathroom of a tavern in another dimension on an adventure Morty was supposed to be leading for once rather than Rick. The endings of S1E06 "Rick Potion #9" and S1E08 "Rixty Minutes", as mentioned before, are particularly emotional. There's also the end of S2E02 "Mortynight Run", when Morty is forced to kill a gas cloud he made friends with after trying to save it from an assassin, only to learn that it intended to wipe out all carbon-based life in the universe. It's a reminder of how many bad things can happen even when one has the best of intentions in trying to save someone from an assassination. Another one is the end of S2E03, which has a name that probably shouldn't be printed here, even with the discussion of all of the other things this blog post has mentioned. Rick reunites with an old flame, a pangendered hive mind referred to as Unity (its central body being voiced by Christina Hendricks) (it should probably be quickly mentioned that Rick is pansexual and capable of attraction to nearly anyone and anything, which is why he can have a relationship with an entity that takes over the minds of both the males and females of an alien species, and Unity uses "it" pronouns), though after a fun day with Unity and many of the aliens it has assimilated, Unity leaves Rick and explains why in a series of notes- that as fun as Rick is, he is an extremely dangerous bad influence on Unity and, in a way, is better at what Unity does than Unity itself, being taking you out of your body and making you forget who you are. When Rick gets home, Rick is so depressed that he accepts Beth's wishes to not hold any more alien prisoners in the garage without a fight, as she and Jerry spent the afternoon locked in the basement lab of the garage arguing over whether the alien being held there was a prisoner or someone Rick was trying to help. He tries to act as if he didn't agree with Unity enslaving people and that is why he left her to hide just how tormented by what happened he is. Set to the song "Do You Feel It?" by Chaos Chaos, Rick sets up a laser, brings an organism to life only to kill it under the laser, and then puts his head in under the laser only to pass out and for his head to fall out of the laser's range right before it can go off. He spends the next few days unconscious in the garage. Ouch. The end of S2E07 "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez" is actually pretty sad as well. Morty and Summer fight Tiny Rick to save the real Rick's personality from him. Morty holds Tiny Rick down, and Summer puts earbuds in Tiny Rick's ears and plays a sad song about drowning your sorrows in alcohol on her phone's music player. This brings back the old Rick and makes Rick decide to cancel his immortality project... by cutting up all of the other younger clones of himself with an axe. However, S2E10 "The Wedding Squanchers" takes the cake for the saddest episode of Rick and Morty, if not the saddest episode of any TV show made in 2015. The Sanchez-Smiths are invited to the wedding, or "Melding" of Rick's old alien friend and fan favorite character Bird Person (the only major recurring character to be voiced by Dan Harmon) and Summer's friend Tammy Guterman (voiced by Cassie Steele), who Bird Person picked up at the party in S1E11 "Ricksy Business". However, Tammy reveals herself to be a deep cover agent for the Galactic Federation, a police organization that Rick and his friends have been enemies of for years, and murders Bird Person in cold blood. The Sanchez-Smiths barely escape with their lives on one of the catering vans and are forced to find a new planet to live on, as the Galactic Federation wants to find and interrogate them. They settle on a small planetoid with a log cabin on it. Rick goes exploring and finds the planet's core, which is directly under the house. He overhears the rest of the family talking about the situation. Jerry wants to turn Rick over, but the rest of the family angrily refuse, saying that in spite of their problems with Rick, he's still part of the family. Jerry, dumbfounded by this, asks if they're seriously going to sacrifice the rest of their future for someone who only values others as far as they can help him with whatever thing he's become interested in doing this current hour. Beth explodes in tears at this point and says that it's because she doesn't want her dad to leave her again. Rick, feeling guilty and reminded of how much he hates himself, tells Morty, as he plays with a frisbee by himself (simply by throwing it, turning around, and catching it as it comes back on the other side of the planet), that he's going to go get some ice cream. Morty can tell that Rick actually intends on leaving, and tries to tell Rick that he won't forgive him for breaking Beth's heart again, barely concealing Morty's feelings that he needs Rick as well. It doesn't stop Rick, and as the song "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails plays, Rick flies away in the van the family stole, contacts the Galactic Federation, and announces himself as Jerry Smith, saying that the wanted criminal Rick Sanchez kidnapped him and his family, left them on a dwarf planet, and went to the Flim-Flom Tavern in the Gloppydrop system. "Jerry" also asks that the family be allowed to have a normal life and not be bothered by the Federation ever again after this, which they agree to, as they say they only want Sanchez. Rick looks at a picture of himself with his friends Bird Person and Squanchy in better times while having one last drink at said tavern and walks outside the bar with his hands up as it is surrounded by Federation police. The rest of the family is retrieved by the Galactic Federation and is returned to Earth, which has been turned into an alien tourist destination in the hype going around the galaxy surrounding a human terrorist being at large in the Milky Way. Jerry is given employment by the Federation in an unspecified position and while Jerry is overjoyed to be safe home on Earth and have a stable job after spending all of Season 2 unemployed, Morty, Beth, and Summer are all ill at ease from the trauma of what happened to them and from the uncertainty of whether or not Rick abandoned them because of his selfishness and cowardice or if he had another reason for leaving. When Rick gets to the space prison and is strapped to a wall of criminals, he is asked the obligatory "what're you in for", and he, with an apathetic and self-loathing face, says "Everything." Dare we try to find something happier in the show?
3.) Despite its cynical musings, it knows how to be uplifting. Yes, the show is probably the most cynical mainstream western animation series ever created. Its premise is centered around life having no apparent meaning aside from the one someone chooses to make and how we must live with the choices we either make or have thrust upon us and are powerless to change the past. It reminds us that we're not powerless to change the future, however. Despite the fact that most of the links between the members of the Sanchez-Smith family are irreparably broken, they still know how to be there for each other when it counts. Morty has pretty strong relationships with Jerry and Summer, despite getting frustrated with them often, and while we have yet to see any real one-on-one interaction between Morty and Beth, the two of them seem to at least want to think the best of each other. The three selected heartwarming moments I have on my mind are these- S1E03 "Anatomy Park"- Much of it, because of how it's the show's Christmas special, even if most of it is at the expense of Jerry, who wanted a technology-free "human holiday" and invited his parents over, only to quickly learn that he was not the most important person of the day like he was trying to have it be. The events of the day seem earnest regardless. S1E09 "Something Ricked This Way Comes"- Morty assures Jerry that despite his insecurity and lack of intelligence, he's still his dad, and while he doesn't want his help in science projects, Morty still wants to hang out with his dad. S2E04 "Total Rickall"- After the house gets invaded by mind-altering parasites pretending to be beloved and perfect family members and family friends and the family can't tell family from parasite, Morty, believing Rick is a parasite, gets two of the "friends" to hold Rick down. Rick tells Morty that he only has a few good memories of him and that most of Rick's memories of Morty are of him being a whiny little punk, so he should just go ahead and shoot him through the head. Morty reads into these words, realizes that the parasites only made positive memories of themselves, and convinces the rest of the family to shoot the family members that they have no bad memories of, and that the ones they do have bad memories of (which the Sanchez-Smith family has plenty of bad memories of one another) are the real ones. The message here is how the relationships we have with people are supposed to be imperfect, as that's how we know they're real. If something feels too good to be true, it probably is. It's the bad times we have with our family and friends that make the good times that much better. The show is truly satisfying oftentimes. My three selected "awesome" moments- S1E01 "Pilot"- At the very end, as Morty is writhing on the garage floor in pain as seeds that he ate to get Jerry and Beth off of Rick's back to make him appear smarter than he is so that they don't force Rick back to a retirement home in order to get Morty to go back to school more often rather than be on adventures with Rick dissolve inside him, Rick stands over him giving a rambling speech about the two of them being together for a hundred years and all of the great things they will accomplish together. S1E11 "Ricksy Business"- Bird Person explains that Rick's seemingly nonsense catchphrase, "Wubba-Lubba-Dub-Dub!" is bird-person-speak for "I am in great pain. Please help me." He reminds Morty that despite his problems with Rick, he knows that Morty likes the time he spends with his grandfather, and convinces him to not blame him for the house being trashed as a result of the party and the house going to another dimension. S2E01 "A Rickle In Time"- When the time surrounding the house gets split into sixty-four "equally possibly impossibilities" and one of the Mortys in it nearly falls outside of the space-time continuum, one of the Ricks prepares to sacrifice himself to save Morty, even saying "I'm OK with this. Be good, Morty. Be better than me." when it happens. Many believe that Rick and Morty is the best show ever produced at Williams Street, and I would have to agree.
So what's next for the show? Season 3 is expected to air on Adult Swim sometime in between September and December of 2016 and be fourteen episodes long rather than the eleven of Season 1 and the ten of Season 2. Rick is expected to escape prison pretty quickly, though whether or not it will be something he planned in advance is yet to be seen. The fan favorite race of characters known as Mr. Meeseeks are expected to return, even if they have to be forced into an episode in an extremely awkward and contrived way. Mr. Meeseeks are blue creatures that initially have a positive and helpful demeanor and exist to fulfill simple tasks asked of them and made their first appearance in S1E05 "Meeseeks and Destroy". They will try, however, to fulfill any task asked of them, regardless of whether it's simple or complex, as they hate existing and can only fade away after the task asked of them has been completed. They become more and more psychotic the longer they are alive without their assigned task being finished. Jerry learned this the hard way when he tried to get one to help him take two strokes off of his golf game, but Jerry was so bad that he couldn't even be taught by thirty Meeseeks. The Meeseeks even try to hold hostage a restaurant that Jerry and Beth are having a date at in order to scare Jerry into improving his game. He manages to prove himself to the Meeseeks, improve his gold swing by improvising with a rusty pipe for a club and a tomato for a ball, makes the Meeseeks fade from existence, and saves the restaurant (after showing a "Stickler Meeseeks" his short game). Perhaps the Meeseeks can help in breaking Rick out of prison. They would probably bring the Gromflomites, the aliens that make up most of the Galactic Federation, to extinction. Season 3 is also expected to go deeper into the show's myth arc, with episodes that go deeper into explaining why Rick is the way he is and his history with "Evil Morty", a version of Morty that wears an eyepatch from S1E10 "Close Rick-counters of the Rick Kind" that, for currently unspecified purposes, used a robot "Evil Rick" to kill various Ricks across the multiverse, kidnap and torture their Mortys, and frame the main Rick for all of it. This has led many fans to speculate that Evil Morty is the main Rick's original Morty who gained a darker personality and a vendetta against all Ricks as the result of a past betrayal by the main Rick. At least one episode is supposed to be a flashback episode set in Beth's childhood that shows her relationship with both Rick as a younger man and her mother and show what exactly made Beth's mom leave Rick, under what circumstances Rick began traveling the multiverse for twenty years (relative to how time flows in Dimension C-137, as I think that other dimensions could have time pass at different rates and be in entirely different eras than our own timeline), and why Beth is so self-centered and believes that only extraordinary people are worthy of love. They are even expected to have a crossover with Disney XD's Gravity Falls, as Justin Roiland is close friends with the creator, showrunner, head writer, and star of that show, Alex Hirsch, and they say that both shows are set in the same multiverse. Just as Roiland has voiced both Blendin Blandin on his friend's show along with a Billy Mays parody named Bobby Renzobbi, Hirsch voiced Toby Matthews in S2E07, a teenage boy who is essentially a blonde version of Alex, who in real life has reddish-brown hair. Toby was Summer's crush for the episode and began to date her because he found Tiny Rick to be pretty cool and liked dating a family member of his. As soon as Tiny Rick was expelled for killing the vampire lunch server earlier in the episode (something the principal hated to do because he thought that Tiny Rick made his life at the school better), Tiny Rick told everyone at the school dance that it's Summer's fault he got expelled, as she tried to get Tiny Rick to stop being in denial of his original old man personality. Everyone hates Summer after that, and Toby angrily breaks up with her. In that same episode, as tribute to Gravity Falls, the image of Bill Cipher is hidden on a computer monitor on the deep space marriage counselor's office Jerry and Beth go to in the episode's B-plot. It may be hard to pull off because of tonal differences between the two shows and legal reasons, but I think it could be done pretty easily now that Gravity Falls has formally ended. I believe that the Gravity Falls/Rick and Morty crossover would be partially guest written by Alex Hirsch and serve as a deconstruction of most crossover tropes. Ford and Rick have been implied to be friends in the past, with Ford as a freedom fighter alongside Rick, and Rick may have helped Ford smuggle the infinity-sided die from Gravity Falls S2E13 "Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons" through inter-dimensional customs. In this same episode, it is stated that the dimension the main events of Gravity Falls are set in is Dimension 46'\, showing a connection to the multiverse. The deconstruction aspect would come into play with Dipper and Mabel Pines having extremely severe psychological trauma as a result of seeing something from one of the dimensions that Rick and Morty go to, showing just how horrifying it might be to go from living in a TV-Y7/TV-PG world to a TV-14/TV-MA world with no preparation. This may end up being one of the few television crossover episodes to darkly and dramatically move both shows forward rather than just be a cheap way to show characters from different shows in situations that might attract viewers and ratings. I certainly hope something like that would happen. No matter what happens next season, I think that Justin and Dan will know what to do. They hope to have the show last at least ten seasons and do something similar to Simpsons-aging for the characters in that they stay roughly the same age throughout the series. Rick and Morty forever and a hundred years indeed. I'm glad that Justin and Dan have made the show a part of my life and the lives of hundreds more, and it is my primary inspiration for the main TV show I want to make. I even would want to be a writer on Rick and Morty or a similar show for a few seasons before making my own show and would want someone from Rick and Morty's creative department to tell me what they think of my material. That would be one of the best things to ever possibly happen to me, hands down. The only things that might be better could be meeting someone involved in the Lego company or someone who worked on one of the films in The Lego Movie franchise, the Portal video game series, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, or Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. Rick and Morty currently airs in reruns Sunday nights at 11 pm American Eastern Standard Time on Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block and is always available on Xfinity On Demand, the Watch Adult Swim App, and Hulu, and individual episodes and seasons are for sale on iTunes, Google Play TV, and YouTube. It's available for free on YouTube as well, but most of the videos that contain the entire episode have altered video and audio to get around piracy laws, so you'll probably want to avoid that. Thank you for reading, and remember to watch Rick and Morty Season 3 when it airs this fall.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- April 19, 2016- Gravity Falls "Weirdmageddon 3: Take Back The Falls" Review, Analysis, and Speculation

April 19, 2016

Hello, blog readers, this is Neil Rush. After weeks of specific assignments with the blog, I am finally able to review something I wanted to review in this blog for a long time- the Gravity Falls series finale, "Weirdmageddon 3", due to the broader nature of this prompt- write about something entertainment-related in general and propose an idea. While not exactly perfect, this was probably the most dramatically effective hour-long episode of the entire series.
Continuing where "Weirdmageddon 2: Escape From Reality" left off, after escaping the mindscape bubble, Dipper, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy find Stan and an assortment of characters from throughout the show's run holed up in the Mystery Shack, which has been converted into a dark-magic-and-weirdness-proof fallout shelter thanks to the unicorn hair from S2E15 "The Last Mabelcorn". Stan intends on waiting out Weirdmageddon until they run out of food, eat some of the smaller magical creatures if necessary, and hope that maybe something else can stop Bill Cipher's reign of terror, because he's grown too bitter at the world to have the desire to do anything about it himself. Dipper, disgusted that Stan would let the rest of the town that is still frozen and made a part of Bill's stone throne suffer because of his own cowardice, reminds Stan that Ford is still being held prisoner by Bill. Stan shrugs this off and says that it's Ford's fault that Weirdmageddon happened in the first place because of how many of his attempts to keep Bill from making it into the physical world only made it easier for Bill to get into the physical world (apparently Stan has never heard of a self-fulfilling prophecy). A secret news broadcast from inside Bill's base floating above the town, the Fearamid, shows the stone-person-throne and the local news reporter Shandra Jimenez getting turned to stone by one of Bill's eye-bats. The townspeople are mortified to see their loved ones as part of a stone sculpture, such as Wendy's father and brothers and Pacifica's parents, despite her highly strained relationship with them because of their frequent emotional abuse of her, as she agrees that no one deserves to be turned into stone sculptures. Dipper knows that Ford knows Bill's weakness, and he and Mabel give the group a rousing speech to motivate them to fight back against Bill and his monster allies. The group begins to convert the Mystery Shack into a battle machine in order to have a weapon immune to Bill's abilities.
At the top of the Fearamid, in a penthouse suite/study, Ford is removed from his golden statue state but is chained to the floor. Bill sings the public domain song "We'll Meet Again" while playing the piano, playing up his creepiness factor more than ever before. Bill reveals his origins and motivations while fantasizing about the end result of Weirdmageddon. He explains that he lived in a two-dimensional plane and wanted to be free, so he hopes to use his reality warping powers to spread fun and joy (read: chaos, destruction, and horror) to a nearby three-dimensional universe, that one being Dimension 46'\. He even imagines himself drawing a smiley face in the middle of North America, leveling the entire American Midwest in the process. He offers Ford the keys to control the cosmos if Ford tells him how to break the force field around the town confining the town's paranormal activity to the borders of Gravity Falls, but Ford obviously refuses. Bill sets out to find something that Ford cares about enough to make a deal with him for entrance into Ford's mind and find out how far he'll go to protect it.
While the townspeople prepare the Mystery Shack Battle Robot, Dipper, Mabel, and Stan discuss the situation privately. Stan doesn't want to save Ford because of how Ford never thanked him for rescuing him from the multiverse, and is bitter over how Ford is considered the more heroic of the two Stan twins despite his greater responsibility for bringing Weirdmageddon to Gravity Falls. Dipper tells Stan that Ford is the hero because he wouldn't hide when others would, but Stan says that he'd still be alive if he had hid. Once the Shack-tron is all ready, the townspeople launch an assault on the Fearamid. Bill and his allies are trying to torture Ford into revealing the secret to breaking the shield surrounding the town, but Ford refuses to give in. Soos demands the safe return of Ford or else Bill and his friends are in for a beatdown. After a furious but brief fight between the Shack-tron and the monsters. Ford, from a distance, congratulates Dipper and Mabel, making Bill realize that Ford cares about the two of them more than himself, and plans on torturing them. He attempts to destroy the Shack-tron, but it is unharmed because of its immunity to Bill. Bill begins to rapid-fire punch the Shack-tron in a fit of rage, still doing next to nothing to dent the machine. The Shack-tron tears out Bill's eye, giving the townspeople an opportunity to send a handful of them into the Fearamid by rocket-parachute.
Mabel retrieves Ford, who had been turned back into a golden statue briefly, from the throne, but they have no idea how to un-petrify him and the rest of the townspeople frozen in the throne. Gideon, who had been trapped in a cage and forced to dance in a dress for all eternity as punishment for turning on Bill at the end of "Weirdmageddon Part 1", says that the statue of Mayor Tyler Cutebiker is the load-bearer of the throne, and if pulled, the throne will come undone. Tyler is removed from the throne, and Gideon is freed from his cage in the process.
Wendy and Pacifica are reunited with their families, and, in one of the most simultaneously funny, heartwarming, and awkward scenes in the show, Sheriff Blubs is reunited with his cop partner (and ostensible life partner) Deputy Durland, and the two of them declare their undying love for one another. Ford is unfrozen and sees his old friend Old Man McGucket for the first time since he exposed McGucket to the portal and inadvertently drove him insane thirty years before the events of the show. Ford apologizes for what happened to McGucket, and McGucket says, "I've tried forgettin'. (referencing how repeated use of a memory-eraser gun on himself drove him even more insane until he became the crazy hillbilly with a knack for building inventions that appears in the show) Now how about I try forgivin'?" Ford states that Bill's weakness is a special wheel with the image of Bill in the center and ten symbols meant to represent different people, and finds a spray-can to create the image of the wheel. Dipper is meant to represent the pine tree on the wheel because of his hat, Mabel is the shooting star because of her sweater, Stan is the mackerel fish because of his fez hat, Ford is the six-fingered hand because of his, well, six-fingered hands, Wendy is the ice bag because of her cool-as-ice personality, Soos is the question mark because of his T-shirt, McGucket is the pair of glasses because of his scholarly aspirations, Gideon is the pentagram because of the pentagram logo on his old Tent of Telepathy, Robbie is the stitched heart because of his hoodie, and Pacifica is the llama because of the sweater she borrowed from Mabel.
Bill, still fighting the Shack-tron, notices the legs aren't in the shield and tears them off, temporarily defeating the robot. Everyone that has a symbol representing them on the wheel gets on and holds hands, beginning to activate a glowing aura. Stan has not gotten on yet because of his continued bitterness towards Ford, and won't get on until Ford thanks him upfront for saving him. Ford thanks him through clenched teeth, and even corrects Stan for saying "me and him" rather than "him and me". The rest of the people on the wheel can't believe that Stan and Ford would both be so stubborn and petty at this moment of all moments. Stan shoves Ford in anger and breaks the link of the wheel. Bill, with a regenerated eye, appears and laughs at the ten heroes fighting among themselves.
Bill turns Soos, Wendy, Pacifica, McGucket, Gideon, and Robbie into banners hung on the wall of the Fearamid, binds Stan and Ford in ropes, and traps Dipper and Mabel in a triangular prison cell. Bill offers to spare the twins if Ford allows him into his mind, and the twins yell for Ford not to listen to Bill. Mabel sprays Bill in the eye with her own spray-can, giving Stan and Ford another opportunity to escape.
While Bill is distracted, Dipper uses his size-altering flashlight to make the prison cell large enough for him and Mabel to get out through the bars. Once Bill regrows his eye again, he traps Stan and Ford in a cell similar to the one he trapped Dipper and Mabel in, while the twins taunt Bill into chasing them through the halls of the Fearamid. Bill turns into a large, monstrous red-and-yellow form and prepares to kill the twins, saying probably the most horrifying and kid-unfriendly line ever said in the show- "I'VE GOT SOME CHILDREN I'VE GOT TO MAKE INTO CORPSES!"
Stan, while sharing a drink with Ford from what looks like a whiskey hip flask but is probably just a water pouch, expresses guilt for his self-centered behaviors from both the events of "Weirdmageddon 3" and the entire series, and says that he is just as big of a screw-up as his and Ford's father believed he was. Ford regrets that he ever had tried to be Bill's friend like he did during his earlier research in the 1970s, and further laments how bad the relationship between himself and Stan got, wondering how Dipper and Mabel work so well together. Stan says it must be because of their childhood innocence. Ford decides to allow Bill into his mind if it means Dipper and Mabel will live. He also acknowledges that if it weren't for the metal plate Ford put in his head, Stan could erase Ford's mind with Bill inside it, killing him. Stan recommends that Bill goes into his mind, but Ford states that Bill doesn't want anything in Stan's mind and remains adamant in his decision.
Bill eventually catches Dipper and Mabel and brings them back to where Stan and Ford are, preparing to make one or both of them explode. Ford expresses his terms of surrender to Bill, and Bill's physical form turns to stone as he makes the deal with Ford and his mental state goes into Ford's mind... or so he thinks.
Bill realizes too late that he entered Stan's mind, as Stan and Ford switched clothes and pretended to be one another in order to make Bill enter the wrong mind. Ford prepares the memory-erasing gun for erasing Stan's mind, and inside Stan's mind, Bill attempts to frantically call off the deal and begs to give Stan anything he wants in exchange for his life, but Stan won't take the bait, says that the one mistake Bill made was that he messed with his family, and epically one-punches Bill into oblivion. Stan's last thoughts before his mindscape is consumed with blue mind-fire are those of self-reassurance for not being a total screen-up after all.
The effects of Weirdmageddon are undone, the monsters are sucked back into a giant portal, and all of the townspeople are safe and alive. All that remains of Bill is a stone statue with his arm stuck out that begins to gather moss as it sits in the middle of the forest. Stan regains consciousness with total amnesia of everything outside of basic human functions and courtesies. Dipper and Mabel tearfully try to jog Stan's memory, but nothing seems to be working. Ford tells the twins that Stan sacrificed his memories in order to save the world and, now crying himself, tells Stan that he's their hero. They try to sit Stan back in the barely-together Mystery Shack, but he still doesn't remember, and can only say, "Come on, why are all of you so sad? It's like you're all at someone's funeral or something." Alex Hirsch said that a major character would die, and while this wasn't exactly death per se, it almost has the emotional toll of a major character death... for a few minutes.
As Mabel shows Stan pictures from her scrapbook of summer memories, he still can't remember anything until he instinctively calls Waddles and Soos by their names. From there, he seems to get the rest of his memories back within a few minutes. Mayor Tyler Cutebiker passes the "Never Mind All That" act, saying that Blubs and Durland have permission to tase anyone who mentions the events of Weirdmageddon. The two cops say "We're mad with power! AND LOVE!"
The Northwest family has gone broke as a result of Preston Northwest attempting to invest in "weirdness stocks", forcing the Northwests to sell their mansion in order to buy an upper-middle class house. Priscilla says that Pacifica can only afford one pony for her birthday this year, and she reacts with exaggerated shock and horror. McGucket sells his inventions and becomes rich enough to buy the Northwests' mansion and live in it himself. Toby Determined, under his newfound trying-too-hard-to-be-cool persona Bodacious T, invents a new sport called Death Ball and tries to cover it on the local news.
Everyone in town shows up for Dipper and Mabel's thirteenth birthday on August 31st, the last day of summer and the twins' last day in Gravity Falls. Gideon shares that thanks to the twins, he's not going to be an evil psycho-child anymore and will try to be a "normal kid" with a skateboard... albeit one with his own crew of ex-convicts to beat up those that bully him for being fat. Dipper said that at the beginning of the summer, he would've wished for adventure, mystery, and friends, but learned over the summer that he has all of that already. Mabel wishes she could shrink everyone in town down to action-figure size and take them all home, but she settles for everyone signing her scrapbook, and steps on the memory-eraser gun to show her commitment to never forgetting the people in town. Now that they are teenagers, Wendy, Robbie (who no longer resents the twins), Tambry, Nate, Lee, and Thompson chant "One of us! One of us!" to celebrate.
Stan and Ford go off to the side so that Ford can tell Stan about strange anomalies in the Arctic Ocean, and that he wants Stan to explore the oceans with him like they dreamed of as kids. Stan announces that due to his upcoming adventures, he will have to close the Mystery Shack, and declares Soos the new Mr. Mystery and proprietor of the Mystery Shack. Soos's grandma moves in immediately.
After Dipper and Mabel's rooms have been cleared from the Mystery Shack and all that remains is Dipper's papers about his original theories of who the author of the journals was and Waddles' food bowl, the twins and their closest friends and family members are with them at the bus stop right before they leave. Wendy tells Dipper that he means a lot to her, takes his hat while giving him hers so that they can remember each other, and gives him a letter to open next time he misses the town. Waddles is initially thought to not be allowed to come home due to the low likeliness of a pig surviving in the suburbs of Piedmont, California and animals not allowed on the bus, but Stan and Ford "convince" the bus driver to let Waddles on with Dipper and Mabel by flashing their brass knuckles and laser gun at him (because this is totally something you should do when you want your family members to be able to take their pet home with them). Stan, in a tearful way that clearly means the opposite, tells the kids that they were nothing but a nuisance and he's glad to be rid of them. Dipper and Mabel, with tears staining their eyes as well, hug Stan back and say they'll miss him too.
Dipper and Mabel walk onto the bus hand in hand, with this exchange- Dipper- "Ready to head off into the unknown?" Mabel- "Nope! Let's do it!" They wave to their friends and family as they chase the bus for a few steps.
The closing montage shows Soos and his girlfriend, a young woman from Portland named Melody who had her most prominent appearance in S2E05 "Soos and the Real Girl", running the Mystery Shack together and Stan and Ford fighting a Kraken-like creature in the middle of the Arctic Ocean while aboard their new boat, the Stan 'O War II. Dipper's narration states, "If you've ever taken a trip through the Pacific Northwest, you've probably seen a bumper sticker for a place called Gravity Falls. It's not on any maps, and most people have never heard of it. Some people think it's a myth. But if you're curious, don't wait. Take a trip. Find it. It's out there, somewhere in the woods, waiting." As Mabel falls asleep on Dipper's shoulder, Dipper opens the letter Wendy gave him, and it says, "See you next summer!" with signatures from Durland, Schmebulock, Gideon, Lazy Susan, Thompson, Stan, Tyler, Soos, McGucket, Grenda, Nate, Lee, Candy, Robbie, Wendy, Ford, Blubs, and Pacifica. Dipper gives a reassured smile from seeing all of the people that love him as the bus rides off into the sunset. The credits, which are made in a more cinematic style than all of the previous episodes, show pictures of things such as Grenda kissing Marius, her Austrian prince boyfriend, while on a boat with him on vacation, Dipper clones 3 and 4 from S1E07 "Double Dipper", who were never seen again after stealing Robbie's bike in that episode, sitting by a campfire in the forest and avoiding melting in water like all of the other Dipper clones by wearing raincoats, Dipper, Mabel, and Waddles making it safely back to Piedmont, and live-action footage of a Bill statue in the woods, prompting a real-life search for a Bill statue planted in the Redwood Forest.
This was not perfect. The use of the Bill Cipher Wheel was somewhat unsatisfying, given that most of the decisions for who represents each symbol were obvious and that it didn't even work in the end. I think it would be better if it showed Stan will be gradually getting his memories back over time rather than him getting all of them back once, as it made Stan's heroic sacrifice come off as unearned. I also think it might've been nice if it showed Dipper having just-friends endings with the three characters he's been shipped with the most that are the least bizarre- those three people being Wendy, Candy, and Pacifica- with room for him to possibly date one of them as a teenager. I think they could've given Bill deeper motives than what essentially amounts to "I was bored." He is known for having even worse family issues than Stan, and even implied on the Bill Cipher Reddit Ask Me Anything session last year that he is a self-made orphan, another thing way too dark to explicitly state on the show. Lastly, I would've liked to see Blendin Blandin and the Time Baby return for all loose ends involving them to be tied up. Fortunately, many things are to be resolved in what is basically a Gravity Falls Expanded Universe.
When decoded, something Bill says when he's uncontrollably shapeshifting as he's being defeated in Stan's mind is "My time has come to burn! I invoke the ancient power that I may return!" It is decoded with a cipher that reads "Axolotl". An axolotl is a type of water-breathing reptile that is known for reaching adulthood without any type of metamorphosis as a type of regenerating ability. It's a nice sign of just how clever the show's writers are, and a nice way of showing that there are ways in which Bill can return. There are plenty of other mysteries to be solved, from what is Dipper's real name to what make Gravity Falls such a hotbed for paranormal and supernatural activity to what is Ford's connection to Rick Sanchez of Rick and Morty to a variety of other things. A lot is expected to be revealed in Gravity Falls: Journal 3, a hardcover book due out on July 26, 2016 containing 256 pages worth of never-before-told facts about the show. Also coming out that day is "Dipper and Mabel and the Curse of the Time Pirates' Treasure!", a choose-your-own-adventure-style book in which Dipper and Mabel travel through time and space with Blendin. There are plenty of other options for how the story can be continued, from young adult novels to comics or graphic novels published by a special Disney XD imprint of Marvel to a theatrical film to a TV film to an hour-long special to a miniseries to a spin-off series to a prequel series to a sequel series to references in Alex Hirsch's show on Fox to a console video game to a crossover with Rick and Morty (provided it doesn't become too much of a legal hassle between Disney Television Animation and Williams Street). Alex Hirsch has said that this is not the last you'll see of the Pines family, so just be on the lookout for things relating to the show. I know I'll continue the story in fan fiction format with the twins as sixteen-year-olds that have moved back to Gravity Falls for permanent residence in stories that will try to deconstruct and maybe reconstruct some things about the show.
Certain things aside (Alex's Hirsch's attitude at times, some uneven writing, and the fact that it's really not as kid-friendly as it thinks it is), Gravity Falls is one of the better things I've experienced in 2015-16. I didn't become a fan until spring 2015, when I heard about its critical acclaim, and quickly became attached to the characters, humor, and storytelling. The show is the easiest thing for me to write fan fiction for due to my empathy for characters like Dipper, and it has partially influenced how I write "Fanz", as most of what I watch does. In terms of actual quality and production value, it is probably the best thing produced at Disney Television Animation, and in terms of personal favorites, it is my third favorite show made there, behind Kim Possible and Star vs. the Forces of Evil, my thirteenth favorite TV show, and my thirty-second favorite media franchise as of right now. It's action-packed, epic, funny, heartfelt, scary, heartbreaking, emotional, genuine, realistic (as realistic as a show with a pig filling the role of a dog can get, at least), and empathetic. It dared to use plot elements that no other shows, animated Disney shows or not, would use, such as a brother-sister relationship as a platonic alternative to a romantic arc, crossing over nearly every entertainment genre to the point where the show has no real genre, teaching the importance of not stressing romance too much and allowing yourself to act like a kid while you still are one, and that family doesn't have to be an old-fashioned mother-father-handful-of-siblings. It can be your twin sister, your two old great-uncles, their man-child handyman, and their laid-back teenage employee. And if you trust in them and all of the other people that care about you, you can do more than you ever could've thought possible. I do thank Alex Hirsch for making this tasteful diversion from real life, and I wish him the best of luck with making a high-TV-PG-low-TV-14-rated show for Fox, because given his sense of humor, I think he'd be more comfortable in that environment. The adult cartoon environment, I mean, not the network television environment, because you need to be REALLY lucky to keep a show afloat that's not made by Chuck Lorre in that business model. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week, most likely with something not related to Gravity Falls. Stay weird, fallers.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- April 14, 2016- The Lego Batman Movie

April 14, 2016

Hello blog readers, this is Neil. Due to the very short notice on which this blog was called for and the fact that it was assigned on my work night, Wednesday, with only a day to finish it, and minimal time to write it due to the 5pm to 9pm shift, I will try my hardest to keep this post short. Somethings that are making waves on the internet are the two teaser trailers for The Lego Batman Movie, a spinoff of 2014's The Lego Movie. Will Arnett returns as Bruce Wayne/Batman, and the cast also includes Ralph Fiennes as Alfred Pennyworth, Batman's beloved butler and adviser; Michael Cera as Robin/Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake, or Damian Wayne, Rosario Dawson as Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, and Zach Galifinakis as The Joker. It may also involve the return of DC Comics superheroes from The Lego Movie and their voice actors, such as Channing Tatum as Kal-El/Clark Kent/Superman, Jonah Hill as Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, and Cobie Smulders as Diana Prince/Wonder Woman. The film's plot is supposed to center around Batman trying to learn how to be happier and be more of a team player. This version of Batman generates humor from his frequent admission of how cool he thinks he is and doing silly things that no other Batman would do, such as beatbox and rap, and take himself seriously the whole time as no one else does the same. Nearly every previous version of Batman is to be referenced at one point or another, and it is implied that they all happened in the same continuity in one way or another in the Lego world. The central theme is supposed to be whether Batman can be happy, because as Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the movie's producers and the developers of Warner Animation Group's Lego Movie World, have gone on record to say that Batman just keeps going back to the angst despite having plenty of good things going for him, such as being a genius-billionaire-playboy-philanthropist (the genius and philanthropist parts aren't quite present in the Lego version) skilled in multiple languages and forms of martial arts who owns several luxury cars and is friends with several superheroes and is even co-president of an intergalactic superhero council. People praised the trailers as a breath of fresh air in light of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which many find too dark without justification by good storytelling like the Christopher Nolan Batman/Dark Knight trilogy, and that an acerbic parody/satire of what Batman has become in modern times is more than welcome in the current cinematic landscape. Perhaps it can get to the point where the message for Batman is that he can and should stop every once in a while to appreciate the cool life he lives even while acknowledging how bad it gets. Perhaps that's a lesson all of us could benefit from, whether you're a superhero or not. Thank you for reading, and I hope to have a good and meaty post next time.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- April 5, 2016- To Stream Or Not To Stream

April 5, 2016

Hello blog readers, it's Neil. This week's blog assignment is to say whether streaming media is good or bad. While I do think that it is good, I also think that a lot of those who praise it overestimate what it can do and what it will do to television and film. The combination of Netflix-type streaming services, On Demand, and Redboxes at nearly every commercial retail outlet has all but put video stores out of business. People watch TV on their own time now rather than on broadcasters' time, and the typical three-act format is being played with so as to accommodate a show streaming on something like Apple TV, iTunes, HBO Now, the Showtime app, Crunchyroll (an anime-exclusive streaming service), the app versions of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox; Yahoo Screen, Vimeo, and all of the rest of the video streaming services. And yet, this has led people to believe that in a few years' time, they will replace cable and satellite television. Dan Harmon, the creator of NBC's cult classic sitcom Community and co-creator of my sixth favorite TV show as of right now, Adult Swim's animated quasi-philosophical science-fiction-with-very-occasional-fantasy-and-supernatural-elements action-adventure soft-horror black comedy-drama Rick and Morty, has discussed this aspect of modern television in an interview from a few years ago with Hitflix. He mentioned his observation that ratings have become the least important thing about television, at least when it comes to cable. Harmon explained that (paraphrasing) the large corporations that measure ratings do so because they need something to cling onto, and that eventually, capitalism will do what it does and pull out the bottom from what's working, and all of the money you thought you could gather suddenly falls away, and then we'll find a new way to measure viewers. Harmon went on to say that with 8,000 shows on the air, we have to stop treating them like they are all competing with one another, and acknowledge that most people watch what they want on their own time. Harmon says that due to his way of thinking (which he has previously stated is somewhere on the Asperger's-autism spectrum), he could only be a success in television in a crumbling business model, and that if it were still working the way it did in the 1980s, he would have been fired and forgotten long ago. While I do usually admire Dan Harmon, his absolute faith in left-leaning principles, fiscal or social, and rather abrasive way of expressing them, can make him hard to like at times. Others have acknowledged that despite Harmon's cleverness, he does try to justify his own questionable real-life behaviors through public hand-wringing about human morality and its complicated ins and outs, essentially using longhand talk to say what amounts to the rather immature statement of "well, you do it too!" I try not to fault him too much for this because of how this is most likely a result of Asperger's syndrome, and I doubt I'll be much better if I end up becoming semi-famous and gain a public media presence, but it's still something to think about.
Anyway, this is about public perception of streaming services. A book I read last summer by journalist Michael Wolff was called "Television is the New Television", which tries to refute the claims that streaming and internet media will overtake all of the rest of media in a few years' time. He explained that despite the rise of original content on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, they are dependent on buying the rights to existing films and television series in order to stay afloat. HBO and Showtime still need old-fashioned subscribers as well as users of their streaming services. Rather than compete, old and new media helps one another out, so one cannot exist without the other. Dish has already began to offer Netflix as an add-on subscription in a similar fashion to HBO, Showtime, and Starz, and so it is expected that other cable and satellite companies follow suit within the next few years and provide Hulu and Amazon as well (though Amazon will be a little harder because the streaming service is tied directly to the online superstore, and you need to be an Amazon member in order to get anything on Prime Instant Video). Of course, Comcast is trying to make Xfinity into the X1 Entertainment Operating System; essentially a Netflix-type service minus original programming, so maybe not in every company. In conclusion, streaming media is pretty good, but not the end-all-be-all of media. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- March 8, 2016- A Song I Like

March 8, 2016

Hello blog readers, it's Neil again. This week's post is supposed to be about a song that managed to have an impact on me. The first thing I thought of was the song "Hurt" by Nine Inch Nails, later covered by Johnny Cash (yes, really, the Cash one came later) and various other artists, because of how it was used at the end of Rick and Morty Season 2 Episode 10 "The Wedding Squanchers".
Its use came after a very emotionally intense series finale. After the Sanchez-Smith family, consisting of grandfather Rick Sanchez, grandson Morty Smith, teenage sister/daughter/granddaughter Summer, mother/wife Beth Sanchez-Smith, and father/husband Jerry, go to the wedding of Rick's old friend Bird Person to his human fiancee Tammy, a human girl who was one of Summer's best friends that Bird Person began dating after picking her up at a human/alien party hosted by Summer and Rick at the end of Season 1, Tammy reveals herself to be a deep cover agent for the Galactic Federation, an organization of space police, that has been after most of the people at the wedding for many years because of their involvement in anarchistic activities. She murders Bird Person in cold blood and nearly does the same to the family until quick thinking on Rick's part allows them to escape in a space ice cream truck. Now recognized as intergalactic fugitives, the family cannot return to Earth without the risk of being interrogated and/or tortured by the Galactic Federation. They try to find a new planet to live on, and the one they more-or-less settle on is a very small planet with one log cabin on it; a planet that can be walked around in its entirety in slightly under a minute. Rick decides to "explore" and finds a cave at the planet's South Pole that leads directly to its core, which is the size of a basketball and can be easily navigated around. Rick manages to sit in a whole directly under the log cabin to hear the rest of the family discuss the situation. Jerry, having never particularly liked Rick at all (outside of a more mentally impaired yet kinder version of Rick from another dimension when various Ricks stayed at their house), recommends turning Rick in to the Federation, which Morty, Summer, and Beth all angrily refuse to do. Summer tells Jerry that they shouldn't show Rick love in hopes of a reward and that they should love him unconditionally (a statement that I found slightly hypocritical, given that Morty seems to be the only one of them that loves his dad Jerry in spite of his occasional frustrations with him and how his insecurities make him do some pretty irrational things that can negatively affect him). Beth then explains the real reason she wants to stay with Rick, while exploding into tears- she doesn't want him to leave again as he had when she was a child and her parents were divorced, desperately wanting to cling onto the more remarkable of her two parents, even if his remarkability cane from being a sociopathic scientist and intergalactic/interdimensional criminal that regularly endangers her son. This makes Rick decide to do the only thing he can do, and the only way his family can get off of the planet. He tells Morty that he's going to go get ice cream on a nearby planet, and Morty immediately notices that he plans on leaving. Morty tells Rick that he can handle it if Rick leaves (in a way that shows that he really can't), but he'll break Beth's heart, and that he can't forgive him for that, but knows he can't stop Rick regardless. This is when the song begins to play. While flying away, Rick contacts the Federation, announcing himself as Jerry Smith and saying that Rick kidnapped him and his family, left them on a tiny planet, and went to a bar on a nearby planet. He also requests that the family be allowed to have a normal life and not be bothered by the Federation, which the Federation agrees to. After giving one last rude dig at Jerry while pretending to be him (just in case the Smiths ever manage to hear this recording so that they know it was Rick who made the call), Rick goes to the Plim-Plom Tavern to have one last drink while looking at a picture of himself and his friends in happier times before surrendering to the Federation. More agents come to pick up the other Smiths and take them back to Earth, which has become a tourist destination for aliens thanks to the publicity it had made in the space news for being discovered as the home of one of the galaxy's most infamous criminals. Jerry is allowed to go to an employment office to be assigned a new job after being unemployed for a very long time, and is the only one of the family who is happy to be home, as Morty, Summer, and Beth are still distressed from Rick leaving them. Rick is put into custody at a maximum-security space prison, and when a fellow inmate asks him what he's in for, Rick bluntly, dryly, and defeatedly responds with "Everything."
The use of the song in this scene makes it much sadder than it would be without it. The lyrics work pretty well for the character of Rick, as the line from the song "Everyone I know goes away in the end" fits well with how his best friends are dead and how he doesn't expect to see his family ever again. This was the first media work in a very long time that actually caused me to struggle to talk about it later a few days after seeing it for the first time. It may have been a little bit of how I was frustrated with my mom for seeming to be interested in the show only to later say that it was too bizarre for her and only after hearing my reaction to this episode in particular did she want to learn more about it and gain at least a decent understanding, if not a respect, for the show. Around the episode's time of airing, October 2015, I was dealing with some complicated emotions about what family really means, and still am to an extent. I was wondering why I felt emotional apathy towards those who raised me yet loved, or at least felt the desire to love, friends from school that I don't see much, if at all, anymore due to graduation, and strangers based on a shared fandom. The episode also made me question whether or not I desire to love family only if I expect something in return, whether loving your family is something that you're "supposed" to do in civil society and whether I should really do it simply because a larger societal body says it's the right thing to do, the love of a parent for a child versus the love of a child for a parent, and whether I could do what Rick did if I were in a similar situation. I, at least for a little while, came to the conclusion that I could if I were the parent or grandparent in the family, but not if I were the child or grandchild. While "Hurt" isn't necessarily about these themes, as the original was more about suicidal thoughts and self-loathing (things Rick regularly deals with), and the Johnny Cash version was a meditation on being old and close to death, these emotions probably wouldn't have surfaced had they not used a really sad licensed song such as that one and just recorded a generic sad track. I prefer the end of the Johnny Cash version, because of how the end of the Nine Inch Nails version is a minute-long bit of discomforting ambient noise, but I think that the Nine Inch Nails version is darker and more powerful, which is why I'm glad they used that one at the end of the episode. That is my mediation on a song that has impacted me. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.

Neil Rush CMT Blog- March 1, 2016- Make America OK Again

March 1, 2016

Hello blog readers, it's Neil again. This week, I'm supposed to share my opinion on the media's coverage of the 2016 presidential election. It's not good. As a self-identifying center-right libertarian, I'm pretty mistrustful and resentful of most people with public political interests, either conservative or liberal, and feel that while it may make you feel like a good person for a little bit to do something good for your party for a little bit, a more political mind is naturally a more cynical one that often views people as statistics and oversimplifies complicated ethical issues down to simple statements of "this is the only way and anyone who thinks differently is a bad person". That being said, I think that by its own standards, the media is covering the election just fine. By standards of common decency, they are covering it in a beyond awful fashion. Let's look at the candidates, shall we?
First we have Ted Cruz, who managed to defy the embarrassment of his filibuster a few years back to become a sometimes-OK-sometimes-abysmal policy advocate. The best thing about Bernie Sanders is also the worst thing- he's a wide-eyed idealist. Donald Trump... more on him later. Ben Carson was a former neurosurgeon who got into politics and, while I find his desire to bring church and state closer to be, for lack of a better term, inappropriate, I find him the easiest to get behind of all of the existing candidates otherwise due to his surprisingly accurate statements on political correctness. John Kasich has managed to win my dad over due to his appearance as a moderate Republican, though his record apparently isn't as moderate as a semi-progressive like my dad (or especially my sister) would like to believe. Hilary Clinton might be someone I'd vote for if she were not, well, a Clinton. And while Marco Rubio's social policies may not be perfect, his relentless string of burns on Donald Trump in the most recent CNN debate was reason enough to vote for him.
Trump was always an obnoxious personality for his infamous legacy as a business mogul, reality television star, and various political "commentary" on various news channels. And yet, no one ever thought he would try to run a campaign. OK, they thought he would, but not that it would be a success. He thinks that he can pressure Mexico into building a giant wall to keep them out, a wall that would probably take at least fifty years to build. The only way he could do that would probably be starting a war with Mexico, which I would honestly not put past him and find pretty hypocritical given his criticism of the Bush administration and the Iraq War (though that's more against the Bush family that he wants to belittle rather than actually about the ethics of the Iraq War, and he wants to step up torture without the pretense of "enhanced interrogation"). He supported multiple Democratic positions in the late 1990s/early 2000s, such as formerly being pro-choice on abortion, but reversed his positions in order to appear more conservative. This has been seen as contradicting himself rather than views evolving over time when receiving new information or having a change of heart due to direct experience. Some say he, for better or worse, tells it like it is, but I think he rather tells it like he would like to pretend it is in order to paint himself as the hero and everyone else as the villains. Through his general attitude, whether intentionally or not, he has managed to offend nearly everyone, such as blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, and women. The only volatile socio-political group he has not offended is LGBTs, because it's clearly not worth his time. And his recent inability to make a definitive yes-or-no answer that, for his benefit, probably should've been a no, on whether or not he accepts the support of David Duke, the current representative of the modern Ku Klux Klan, when sixteen years ago he did criticize the KKK ideology, has once more served to embarrass what he thinks he stands for. Some have even theorized that he was meant as a false flag candidate for Hilary Clinton's campaign due to his previous support of the Clintons in the 1990s, and that Hilary set him up to be a ridiculous exaggeration of Republican candidates that uses populism and sensationalism to "win" the media over, "earn" the Republican nomination, and hand her an easy win. This however is just a conspiracy theory, albeit a strangely plausible one. What has allowed him to succeed as he has? Some say it is because of his attitude centered around winning, even at the cost of actual politics. Some say it is because of his anti-establishment nature that fearlessly criticizes the Obama administration. I feel like that it is a general rise in cynicism among Americans.
It's been said that a cynical culture breeds a cynical audience. The rise of quasi-progressive social politics being forced into nearly every facet of life in the 2010s, such as literature, comics, film, television, and video games, has been a double-edged sword. While it has allowed for more awareness on how we treat others and has even made some of my favorite media works possible, such as The Legend of Korra, Portal, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Steven Universe, and, to a lesser extent, Archer, BoJack Horseman, Disney/Pixar's Brave and Inside Out, F is For Family, Gravity Falls, The Lego Movie, and the most recent installment of Mortal Kombat; it has also allowed for a new form of pretentious culture that ends up legitimizing the very mentality it claims to be against. In order to be a post-racial and post-gender society in which people don't need to come out of the closet, can love whomever or whatever they are most naturally attracted to, and can alter their body to match their brain if need be and use whichever bathroom they prefer, we should stop acknowledging these aspects of people outside of pragmatic purposes, and not even engage in "positive discrimination", which is trying to put non-straight, non-white, non-male, and non-cis people everywhere simply because of such aspects (I suppose this is more commonly referred to as affirmative action) and treating them less like people and more like glass sculptures- fragile, in constant need of everyone's admiration, and put on a pedestal for the whole world to see how amazing it is. Unfortunately, as irrational political correctness becomes more accepted, so does irrational political incorrectness. Plenty of people living in the Bible Belt are tired of Barack Obama ignoring most issues of fiscal and foreign policy (or at least, not doing a particularly admirable job in putting forth sustainable policies in those departments) in favor of pushing for progress in social issues and establishing a good relationship with Hollywood, and are OK with having an apparent unapologetic bigot running the country if it means having a president with his priorities in order. Others have just been so turned off by Obama that they just don't care what happens next to the country and are just throwing in the towel and letting someone with no political experience take over (Chris Christie). The media, as much as they hate to admit it, love Trump, and are pretty close to dependent on him. Some of the more liberal media publications, such as the A. V. Club, The Huffington Post, Salon, and Vox, while claiming to be idealists and against cynicism, political or otherwise, usually write about all of the bad things going on, and while criticizing others who complain without providing solutions, the only solutions they provide are usually extreme, alienating, and while they may not appear necessarily bigoted now and against bigotry, they may definitely appear so fifty years down the line if and/or when straight white men become an oppressed minority. Ironically, most of the people at these publications are privilege central, only hire "the other" through affirmative action, and seem to have self-hatred and white guilt ingrained into their heads.
I don't want to be cynical, but when others are this cynical about the world they live in, it seems that I  have little choice but to follow suit, albeit in my own way. I have enjoyed various works that have espoused both idealism and cynicism in varying shades, and feel that in this confusing world, it's best to be a little bit of all four of the mentalities in the four-philosophy ensemble- idealist, cynic, realist, and apathetic. Perhaps be each one twenty-five percent a piece, and be one a little more than the rest depending on the situation. The show I hope to make, "Fanz", will, in a similar manner to shows like BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty, go pretty far down the rabbit hole of looking at cynical views and show that while some are useful, it is idealism that will truly win out in the end. It will also look at those who, as mentioned earlier, claim to be idealists simply because their politics lean left when they are more cynical than even the most reactionary conservatives could ever be and show just how dangerous that delusional type of thinking can be. Ultimately, the show will provide a message of idealism that promotes seeing people as people first and as skin colors and gender and sexual identities second, how works of fiction can improve how we live, why having other people in your life is so important, and why we can and should try to pave opportunities for those we care about, and even some of those we might not otherwise care about, to lead a better life than we all do now, regardless of politics. As stated by Stephen Colbert once (when out of character), "Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics.  Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow. Saying "yes" leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So as long as you have the strength to, say "yes". Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.