[ SECRET POST #4090 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4090 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.



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02.
[Reylo]


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03.
[black panther, martin freeman]


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04.
[Colm Wilkinson and Philip Quast in Les Mis 10th anniversary concert]


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05.
[Doug Jones]


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06. https://i.imgur.com/UETD1MW.png
[linked for nudity]


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07.


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08.



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09.










Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #585.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think that was generally the vibe of most of the movie - not spelling stuff out, just letting the audience work it out - and I mostly liked that about it.

But I'm not sure how well it works with Ross. I think that strategy kind of failed a little bit with Ross. Cause like, I would have to watch the movie again to be sure, but it didn't really feel like there was anything indicating that Ross would need to be living with that knowledge or that he felt any moral blame for being complicit in it. There's a distinction between something not being spelled out, and something just not being present, and I personally thought that with Ross, it leaned more towards not being present.

[rosehiptea]

nayrt

I agree with this - I didn't see any implication that Ross felt blame or guilt.

(Personally I didn't like the character much but I'll admit I don't have a good reason for that.)

[(Anonymous)]

I think he was, at least, acknowledging where KM learnt his shitty tactics *from*. He acknowledged the bad shit his organisation had done. He owned it.

What, he's supposed to cry in hysterics instead? There isn't time in the movie and the movie isn't *about* him.

[(Anonymous)]

He didn't really sound like someone who was acknowledging that those tactics were shitty, though, or even that he was sorry that Killmonger had gotten out of hand. I thought that he sounded very matter of fact about the whole, "he's one of ours, and he's using the CIA handbook on how to destabilize a legitimate government." I heard this tone a lot in training when we'd talk about gangs infiltrating the Army to get weapons training and recruitment opportunities; it is very much not the tone of these kind of guys saying, "this is, at least, morally reprehensible," and more, "sure, this guy's a dirtbag, but hot damn, do our TTPs do their job, hooah." But I might be biased.

[(Anonymous)]

All I can say is that from my seat in the theatre, it felt that he was taking responsibility for his organisation's tactics. He wasn't saying, 'that guy's a rogue', or, 'that guy's blood will out, of course he's bad' . He directly attributed the appalling tactics that were hurting the people he talked to, to his own organisation.

What's a TTP, by the by?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, he said they trained him, but he didn't ever say that those tactics were appalling. I guess that's what I'm trying to get at.

Sorry. TTP stands for "Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures."

[(Anonymous)]

"but he didn't ever say that those tactics were appalling"

It's heavily implied? What with the guy moving in and destroying cultural treasures and ripping at the heart of a peaceful country and fomenting war? And - I'm just going to say this again because it's a thing that happens in rl discourse after an atrocity - he *didn't* disown Killmonger. He didn't say "rogue agent" or "well of course the black guy would use this training irresponsibly" or #notallCIA. He was flat: "We taught him how to do this. This Thing of Darkness we acknowledge ours."

I don't know what to say, I think we're reading very different things into body language and dialogue.

(Thanks for the info.)

[(Anonymous)]

NAYRT

I think probably that was the director's intention.

I guess my problem is that I think it should have been more explicit. In particular, it just feels like... in US media, just because you show something that's clearly evil being done by a security agency, it doesn't therefore follow that you're criticizing the institution. The depictions of those institutions in American media, and the elisions and moral double standards that they usually involve, are just so commonplace. It's dangerous to let something speak for itself in a context that's so distorted already. I just really think that's something that you need to be slightly more explicit about.

[(Anonymous)]

Like I said, it might be my bias, but CIA characters often read very similarly to Army characters for me, and coming from that lens, it seemed like the audience was supposed to get the "this is appalling" vibe from the Wakandans and not from Ross/Freeman. Ross def seemed like the officer who tookover a shit-sandwich and was like "I'm familiar with the way to make this kind of shit-sandwich." It just seemed very matter of fact to me, and not like he was making a judgment call. And no where in the narrative did anyone actually side-eye or confront Ross for it (the colonizer comment is before this reveal, iirc, and seemed to be more general). We don't get any kind of "meddling American" throwaway line (a jab at the war on terror or some related propoganda about us being world police would've worked pretty well here and not taken long).

This just seems like an echo of the kind of tabula rasa we aim for when meeting important people we still want to talk to us, but I have a lot of really complicated feelings about my service, so it's entirely possible I read the room wrong. *shrug*