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When Rose McGowan appears in Asgard: a review of "Thor: Ragnarok"




The best part of this film was when Rose McGowan appeared in Asgard and accosted Odin and his sons for covering up, with a prettified, corporate, outward appearance that's all gay-friendly, feminist, multicultural, absolutely for the rights of the indigenous, etc., centuries of past abuse, where they predated mercilessly upon countless unsuspecting peoples.

And the PR department came in and said, okay Weinstein... I mean Odin and Odin' sons, here's what we suggest you do. First, you, Odin, are going to have to die. No extensive therapy; when it comes to predators who are male, especially white and male, this age doesn't believe in therapy. You did what you did because you are, or at least strongly WERE, evil, so that's what we have to work with. Now death doesn't seem like "working with it," I know, but the genius is that we'll do the rehab with your sons, and when they're resurrected as somehow more apart from your regime, belonging as tropes in some other narrative, some ideal counter narrative, that'll lend them "esteem" that'll counter their former one of sons of a King Rapist so people would have difficulty conflating your past with your present... so perhaps as refugees, leaders of refugees, leaders of a slave revolt -- yep [snaps fingers], that'll do it!; combined, that'll do it! -- we'll bring you back COMBINED with Thor, that is, actually within Thor's corporeal self.

We'll have you say at some point that you find Thor actually more powerful than you are, and this will ostensibly be about you at least trying to be a selfless and gracious person in your last moments of continued existence -- all said while wearing a pink shirt that conflates you with "harmlessness," and a teased-loose sweater that makes you look "folk" rather than "King," to suggest that you're but the product of your age who had a rapacious past like everyone else who had authority within that age had had, but who has done everything within his power in his last moments to garb himself as thickly as possible within modest attire with a feminine tint hoping "outside assistance" will help sink deep what he by his age-specific egoist constitution is shallowly equipped to do on his own. But really it'll lay the eventual backgrounding when in a subsequent film, when all this Rose McGowan and her millions of fellow "accosters" have had their lengthy moment, you'll spring back into full, fully alive form, out from Thor's eye socket (yes, sorry about this Thor, but you'll have to lose an eye), much like whole armadas can emerge from out of a Devil's Anus, proclaiming that the reason your son was more powerful was because already he'd leached his own soul onto his son's.

In the meantime we'll have to take out Hela McGowan, which won't be easy. First, we'll give her her due. She can lord around all over the place; do whatsoever she wills to Asgard. Renovate, tear it down -- whatever. Giving her enormous overlordship is in fact what we'll want out of her, for a number of reasons. One, she'll destroy people we'll actually take pleasure in destroying. So in a sense piggybacking on her, we'll see her casually lay waste to Thor's best friends in Asgard, the ones that helped laid the foundation for why we enjoyed the comradeship in the original Thor so much, why we liked the original movie, and why we gave its "children," its sequels, the go-ahead, and so as youngsters ourselves without much given to us to make our own original routes with we can take sick pleasure in seeing the creations of the likes of Kenneth Branagh which we secretly know were in a sense foundational, made to seem as if they had in fact contributed nothing, when the cover of justified female retribution means all contributions of the male and living large are for us to discount as much as we like, if we like. Taking advantage of hiding within her skirts, we can spit on Branagh, humiliate a great, and him powerless to do anything to stop us, and so we do, for it's us doing the spitting not the being spitted upon. Plus, under guise of some fidelity to his having birthed characters of sufficient life they aren't for others to subsequently lower into the category of fodder, but really actually only to demonstrate ourselves aligned with a movement of righteous empowerment that along with female directors and female actors is also gaining great contemporary steam, we can have the Asian character last the longest, have him actually deflect a few of Hela's dark spears -- something no one else will be shown to be able to do -- before of course succumbing to oblivion. Acquired neatly thereby: some potentially anti-"Hela"/Rose McGowan mana.

Further piggybacking will allow us to test out a maybe useful confabulation -- the only one left standing: Karl Urban's Skurge the Betrayer. Skurge tests out for us whether we could become collaborators, people nestled comfortably with newly emerged dictatorial powers, people sucking at her tits, serving out as her executioners, while living in previous occupants' grand palatial homes, and for this not to be quite as bad as reputation has long held. If we might have to, or want to, be this guy, ready to betray anyone, any principle, if some emerged ostensibly righteous fascist power dictated we do so -- and so like Skurge not arouse her ire! -- then we need to start using films to help flesh out this role so the accrued-guilt part can begin to be abated. So Skurge, even if he's only shown only almost doing so, will evidently slaughter and rape as willed... but we'll say it wasn't his own willing. He was just being expedient, playing out the role of all real human beings who aren't heroes... just flawed, generous but also self-serving, will play out, without grand leadership to guide them. He'll serve as evidence that human beings everywhere are still quite small, after all. As evidence that people who pretend to be genuine heroes are only those who are overly proud; those who have trespassed into terrain not properly theirs... baby boomers, or some such.. maybe "spoiled" millennial students. And of course we'll make sure Skurge dies, but we'll test out the idea of "full redemption" for his actions with his death, to test out the idea of being "just an ordinary human being" could mean what it meant for the Germans post 1945: we felt bullied and intimidated and could do nothing other: we deserve to come out of this clean, ready to enjoy the newly unleashed, fully beneficent age.

Second, it'll give us a good lengthy bit in which to endure public humiliations and de-constructions. Thor, that'll mean phallic castration: we won't just have you put the hammer down(!), but have it severed from you entire (... but there will be redemption: don't worry, I'll get to it). Loki, in a bit of an innocuous bit, we'll also denature you so you're not first of all sorcerers but slipped down worse than second to maybe third (Hela and Dr. Strange, at the very least, will both prove soundly better than you.). So you too will be leached in your field of might, rendered ostensibly as a permanent affliction. You'll both go to a planet where you'll both be "players" to others' amusement. Thor, you'll be tagged and bagged -- importantly: by a woman, a victimized woman, whom you'll almost entirely be impotent to (and to whom even the Hulk will perform [strangely, given that she must have bagged and tagged him] sacrificially to, as pet). You'll domicile amidst other castrated men -- all impotent to both the Grand Master and his champion -- and their filth, their acquired isolation and hopelessness-born, egg-laying perversities, their impotent, failed revolutions, and readily acquiesced, acceded, broken, dead forms. (And later, you'll "get away" in a ship ostensibly covered in sperm from men who were empowered over you as slave-holders and orgy-hosters. [Though in point and fact, this sleek covering might help you better slip through the Devil's Anus.]) Loki, you'll ostensibly go style. But it's only so that you can be rendered into accosted, Hamlet's-mother form, into "Gertrude," as what is supposed to be your entertainment backfires into adversely unwelcome remembrances of what had been done to you in the past to make you go in a blink from triumphant villain to humiliated fraud and pansy.

And while all this is happening to you both, Hela will slowly begin to seem herself a bit too much of a grandiose thing. We don't see her for a long while, but when we do it'll be in face of all the humiliations her confronters have had to endure, and she'll seem especially large in her own long spoiling. This is key, for ripe like that, though we might not yet seem righteously empowered to take her down, she might seem worthy of somebody else's... someone else who also had righteous claims against Asgard, some other long-denied, tortured soul. And so we let some claimant loose to take her down, to take all of Asgard from her, while we claim conquest only over the periphery... we'll defeat her minions and her great giant wolf-dog, but never her own -- we readily admonish ourselves into admitting -- impossible-to-defeat person, and leave the entire golden kingdom, permanently to others' capture. We'll pretend to be oblique to the fact, but we'll know that the person who could in the end take her place is no-doubt one thousand times as phallicly endowed as the Hulk is (the real reason behind Hulk's flashing us, other than suggesting how if we accept ourselves as slaves, rid ourselves of all large pretensions, we can find permitted our rejoicing in ourselves as bequeathed to a harem of designated, working class, fawning women, ostensibly very ready to accept men who aren't much beyond brawn and simple might; who are simple but proud): patriarchy again, staked in place.

Thor, you don't get your hammer back... or at least not yet. But a few things: one, Odin is in you, the original ravager is in you. Second, now more a being of lightning, your power seems less a matter of fortunate phallic equipage and has become more innate, so you're less susceptible to castration in future -- something that's inhibited you now, twice. No one in future is taking away your power. Third, you're open to having a bigger hammer now if you like... as Stephanie Zacharek has suggested, your previous one was a bit comically small, and none of us who watch and create your universe are really quite enough comfortable in our masculinity to be comfortable as she is with that. And fourth, to some extent, you've appropriated Hela's own superior supply of strength: white flashy streams shoot out of you from all over your carapace, just like dark talon-thorns sprout out and shoot out from all out of her. You too are now a Witch-King of Angmar, drawing power from both Kings AND Queens (the Queen part being demonstrated as actually more essential). Loki, this renders you to number four, the fourth most powerful sorcerer, but not being quite magicians ourselves, we at PR have to work doctor with what we've got.



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