[Weekly Update] I binged the entire season of Invincible

Between Halloween and now, Montreal get covered in snow and melting it all 3 times now. This winter is gonna have some wild weathers.

I'm talking about weathers again. What am I, British!?

CHANNEL UPDATE

No update to our upload schedule. But things have been hectic behind the scenes. For the past month, I've been feeling under the weather on and off multiple times. And in the past week, I've gotten sick from a flu, and has yet to fully recover. Luckily, I did record the narration right before losing my voice. But because of that, our next video was delayed for a day...

Believe it or not, I finished editing our video on time. It was going to go live last weekend. However, Shaolin Soccer proves to be one of the most annoying film to talk about. With YouTube being YouTube, any clips longer than 5 seconds can be content ID'ed. I spend two full work days repeatedly re-editing and re-uploading the video. It took 18 tries for me to finally get a version that passed the automated system.

This is, unfortunately, why I never made a full Stephen Chow retrospective in the same vein as Tony Leung or Jet Li or Leslie Cheung. Stephen Chow movies tend to attract the wrath of the copyright gods like honey to ants. They are owned by so many companies, and are also so frequently shared on YouTube in full. It's always a risk to talk about hits works, especially his later, more internationally oriented films.

Let's just hope this is limited to Stephen Chow movies, and not YouTube updating their content ID system. If it's the latter, it would mean the end of the video essay genre. It'd mean all future film discussion will just be still images and talking heads.

With how YouTube is handling the ad-blocker situation, honestly I would not be shocked if it's the latter.

MEDIA TALK

Unfortunately, because of the hectic situation, I was not able to catch up with indie films like I was planning to. While working, I only have limited mental energy to spend. At my 2nd re-upload, I realized I'd be in this for the long halt. So, on a whim, I ended up watching the entire first season of Invincible on a separate monitor.

Okay, "watching" is a generous word. I only half paying attention to it, which may be the better way to enjoy the series anyway. The limited budget means the series brings a lot of visual blemishes whenever I looked. By not paying close attention, I let my imagination filled in most of the action, which helped a lot.

Anyway, spoiler territory going forward. If you are into superhero satires that remains faithful to the genre, and are also no against gratuitous violence, Invincible is a pretty easy watch.

The strong point of the series is definitely the characterization. The genre is often plagued by stereotypes (and anti-stereotypes), due to its source material.

As an example: Lois never realize Clark is Superman is a stereotypical cartoon logic. Realizing this, Zack Snyder's Lois pretty much instantly figured out Superman's identity, and was not shocked by the discovery. That is an anti-stereotype. She's reacting to the situation as if she has the same knowledge as the audience. She's behaving as if she's aware of the stereotype.

Characters in Invincible, however, are smart and true to life, without becoming an anti-stereotype. They operate within the logic of the universe, and react appropriately when they find out each character's secret identity.

Amber is just fantastic. The revelation that she knows about Mark's secret identity, and only have a problem with him because he doesn't trust her enough to tell her the true is such a fresh yet realistic depiction of a relationship. Honestly, the romance between Mark and Amber is way healthier than most rom-coms.

Omni-man is iconic, but also the weakest character to me. Well, weakest in terms of character writing. In an effort to make it clear that he's a manipulative abusive psychopath, the writers put in a lot of fairly obvious red flags. These red flags are especially jarring if you go into the series knowing about this twist. As a result, Nolan doesn't feel nearly as terrifyingly manipulative as he could've been. Imagine how scary it'd be, if we weren't aware of his abusive nature for the entire season, and find out at the same time as Mark.

Also, they must've cast J.K. Simmons in the role because Nolan looks like J. Jonas Jameson. You can't convince me otherwise.

In terms of satire of the genre, I think The Boys is better. But Invincible has more potential. It's only the first season, and it feels like Invincible has established a consistent and realistic world where superheroes are everywhere. It hasn't done much with these rules. But whenever it does, including the aforementioned secret identity, it is done in a way I find more true to life than The Boys, which often exaggerate character behaviours for dramatic effects.

I think that pretty much sums up Invincible for me: potentials. That's usually a bad sign for long form entertainment, unfortunately. Lost, Sherlock, and a whole bunch of other TV shows all operate on potential alone, and always fail to pay off at the end. With the series gearing up for multiple seasons, I don't know if I should be excited to see more. But that's just me.

Anyway, that's the update for this week. Sorry for the lack of a video, but things should go back to normal soon! See you in a few days!