[Weekly Update] When a story is frustratingly unserious

Happy Lunar New Year! It's the year of the Snake. If your age is a multiple of 12, you are of the snake zodiac.

Being of the same zodiac is actually bad luck in Chinese culture. Supposedly to counter this, you have to wear red underwear.

I'm beginning to think this was just an excuse to wear sexy panties.

CHANNEL UPDATE

No heading this time because we only have a short update about our next video.

If you followed us on Bluesky or Mastodon, you might have seen our recent tread on a particular question: Was Kung Fu Ever Used to Fight Foreign Invaders? This question has been on my mind since forever, but multiple research had yielded inconclusive results (outside of the boxer rebellion).

Recently, I have finally found some reliable primary sources detailing such events, and I'm excited to share them with you. So, for our next video, we'll dive right into this topic. Did Chinese folk heroes like Huo Yuanjia and Wong Fei-hung ever fought Western and Japanese fighters? Stay tuned!

This time, I'll be doing the long form YouTube essay thing of diving into the nitty gritty, reading out the sources and detailing the analysis. The goal is an 18 minute video rather than the usual 13. Let's see how it goes.

Finally, I'm relearning how to relax my voice during narration. With time, I became more comfortable with raising my energy during recording. While that works well with more comedic videos (like our last one about Shanghai Joe), I personally prefer the older, quieter side of our old videos. So, I'll see if I can find a balance for our next video.

MEDIA TALK

How do you feel about movies and stories that don't take its own premise seriously?

I'm not talking about movies like Shanghai Joe. One can argue that, despite the movies being quite cheesy, it is nevertheless serious with its own premise.

But I'm also not talking about Sharknado, or Cocaine Bear. Being unserious is its own premise, and its execution merely follows through.

I'm talking Abigail, a movie that begins as a campy thriller but quickly devolved into an absolute stupid mess. This is a film in which someone uses a sliver plate to reflect sunlight onto a vampire, causing it to instantaneously explode into bloody mess. The extreme over the top blood and gore utterly contradicts its suspenseful opening act.

Similarly, the new Mortal Kombat movie has an impressive opening sequence, with a tone similar to how Conan the Barbarian opens its story. This tragic beginning sees a Japanese man having his family killed. In his last ditch effort for revenge, the man sells his soul to the devil, and became Scorpion, an iconic character from the game. What follows, however, is a classic rental B-movie, in which the actions are low budget, filmed inside an alley way and a motel room, and every line of dialogue is a cheesy one liner.

This may be unfamiliar to most viewers of our channel, but recently I've been checking out the Danganronpa series, a Japanese game series about high schoolers trapped inside a high school and forced to kill each other. If anyone successfully killed a person without being discovered, they alone may leave. It sounds like a pretty serious story, and indeed it is. The series is filled with emotional moments, with each death intending to be rather heartbreaking.

At the same time, however, the series is also filled with characters who are, supposedly, high school students with ultimate talents. Ultimate, as in some of them are the most talented model, most talented musician, most talented detective, most talented Yakuza. Yes, Yakuza. It's a very anime thing in a self-serious story, and its oddness is only amplified in the English translation.

To this day, stories with this sort of contrasting tone still bothers me. I see stories as a game, with an agreed upon set of rules formed by genre convention and story context. Violating the film's own tone is a violation of set rule. To a passive audience who prefers the story takes the lead, this may seem fun and surprising. But to an active audience who prefer to guess what is up ahead, it becomes a frustrating experience. To people like me, it just feels like the writer has cheated. The story become literally unpredictable, and thus, I stopped engaging with it.

I'm sure this is just my own pet peeve, but it has always been a big one for me. It's the reason why I never liked Ryan Johnson's films. When Episode VII sets up everything, only for Episode VIII to toss everything away without any pay off - The mystery of Rey's parents turn out to be a nothing burger, the big bad of the series is killed off without a fight, Finn's character arc is entirely tossed aside - it's hard to not feel cheated.

Anyway, that's my thoughts on films that don't take itself seriously, or rather, failing to follow its own rules. Do you like films that surprise you like this, or are you like me and find them kinda cheap? Let me know! I'll see you in the next update!