Luke Cage was awful…part two in a series- Calling me names ain’t going to make this show not stupid.

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In part one of the series – Luke Cage on Netflix was awful, I went on about how Luke Cage was non-blackest Back Show ever, and how they had a guy who should be an underwear model playing Luke Cage.

I prefaced it with a paragraph about my credibility in being able to point out how it was just pandering to the Black community and not actually in any way a good representation of it.  I regret that paragraph.  I regret it down to my core, because A- there is no way to lay that out without seeming like a self aggrandizing buffoon, even if you aren’t.  It’s like trying to be funny on your voicemail message, it’s just always going to come across as lame.  and B- I got called a racist anyway.  Two things I knew for a fact were going to be the results, yet I put the paragraph in…why?  I have no idea.  It was a rookie move.  Pure and simple. I’m ashamed of myself for even bothering. 

So forget all that and just go ahead and think I’m a racist for pointing out how stupid a stupid show was, what do I care?

If people want to swallow the notion that a 65 year old Black guy from the Harlem and a 30 year old Black guy from Georgia have the exact same taste in books…both liking one that’s a crime story from 1952, and another that’s a non fiction thesis about success that was written in 2008, and it wasn’t just grabbing the names of two black authors off the internet, and jamming them into the dialogue for the sake of condescending, lame, pandering, then fine. Sure. happens all the time.  Everybody who’s Blacks like all the same stuff no matter how far apart they are in age or where they are from.  Yep.  I’m not sure why I’m the only person who was annoyed by that type scenario being repeated throughout the show, but whatever. I’ll just sit here with my racist misconception that all Black people are different and unique, and a show that continually acts as though they are all the same is an insult to everyone watching.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe it wasn’t completely stupid, perhaps there was some brilliant scene that tied everything together that I missed when my white hood shifted, when I face palmed after seeing the Lady who owned the Chinese restaurant act shocked that Luke cage had super powers…even though just two episodes ago she watched him stop a bullet with his bare hand.  Or when the cop who got shot in the kidney not only stayed alive and alert for an entire day while bleeding internally, but was able to run around.  Only to drop dead two blocks away from the destination…I remember pulling my white hood down so I couldn’t see through the eye holes anymore, because the sheer absurdity of it all was giving me a migraine…so it is possible I missed some vital explanation as to why the writing SEEMED to be awful.  

Yep, I’m one of those self hating racists though, that’s why I binge watched 13 hours of a T.V. show about a Black super hero, the first day it came out.  It wasn’t a total binge watch though, I did pause it to go burn a cross on someone’s lawn, and then went back to watching the remaining 8 episodes.

Actually only one person called me a racist, some goofball kid…high school from the looks of his FB page. Who seemed to think I don’t get an opinion about a black superhero if I’m white.  Hey, kid…want your mind blown?  Luke Cage was created by an old white guy from Kansas, does he get to have an opinion on it?  He also seemed to think I, being a whitie, have no concept of what hard or ghetto is, thus my assessment of Michael Colter being a soft ass pretty boy had no foundation.  Hey…kid…I’ve been in jail, in actual grown up jail along with actual grown up gangbangers, so shut up and go change your diaper.

…the kid thinks a racist is going to watch and entire season of a show where the hero is a Black guy…?  What a goofball.  I think we need to maybe come up with some different terms…like levels.  This kid needs a different word for a cop who shoots an unarmed black guy who he thinks is a racist and a guy who thinks Luke Cage was a dumb show.  Right now in his verbiage there is no option of differentiation.  How about “micro racism” that’s got a snappy ring to it.  Call me that, not to my face though because that’ll “trigger” me.  I’ll be “triggered” and have to find a safe zone, where T.V. shows at least attempt to make sense.  As opposed to one where the lead is arrested and doesn’t take his girlfriends offer to get him a good lawyer, even though the last time he was in court he ended up in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.  “nah, I’m just gonna take a swing at this myself, maybe look up some legal arguments on line…I’ll be fine.  That first time when I lost and ended up in jail was a fluke.  The D.A. will probably just have some first year lawyer come at me anyway because this is a really low profile insignificant case.  They’re not going to put much effort into it.”

I didn’t get to ask or tell the kid any of that because he blocked me before I could message him back with my 2am blistering tirade.   I hate that, it’s so unfulfilling.  You get four paragraphs of perfectly good juvenile rant all typed out and you hit send and get “you are no longer able to  continue this thread”…or whatever it says.  I had all sorts of mean funny stuff typed out too.  I have a lot of work in front of me that isn’t turning out, I was looking forward to a pointless argument with a teenager until it was conveniently too late to continue failing.  “It’s 3 am already?  I’ve been in a flame war for two hours?  crap…oh well, no time to try to ink this cover for the fourteenth time, might as well go to sleep”…but he was quicker on the trigger than me, and I had no choice but to go back to work…so really he beat me twice when you really look at it. Jerk.

Clearly based on his rant at me, he didn’t even read the blog, much less know who I am.  If he happens to be reading now…listen kid, Power Man is based on a comic book.  It is a comic book character that is now on T.V.  I work in the comic book industry and have had my characters appear on T.V.  So it is in my best interest for shows based on comic books to be successful and really well done, for the sake of my own credibility and financial success. Furthermore, I’ve been reading Luke cage since I was a kid, long before you were even born, and he is one of my favorite super heroes.  So, your race card, is trumped by my royal flush of, age card, professional card, and fiduciary card.

I probably used “fiduciary” wrong, and you need five cards for a royal flush….Oh well, if he didn’t catch the half dozen obvious flaws in every episode of Luke cage, he won’t catch any of that.

He did have one actual point, sort of.  That I didn’t bag on Daredevil like I did on Luke Cage.  First off, Daredevil had it’s stupid moments, but I’d say only about half of it was stupid and it wasn’t stupid stupid, it was just stupid.  By that I mean, if you just watched Narco then yeah, a lot of DareDevil seemed stupid, but if you just watched some CW show, then it was okay. There’s stuff written for grown ups and stuff written for teenagers. Where as every single episode of Luke Cage was a complete mess.  Also, Daredevil wasn’t my favorite, Luke Cage was. I don’t give a crap about Daredevil.   He’s got lame superpowers. And Daredevil’s girlfriend was the Black Widow…another red head..no thanks. Hmm, Spider Man’s girl friend was a red head, Daredevils girlfriend was a red head, the Scarlet Witch was a red head, Black Bolts wife was a red head…wasn’t Phoenix a red head too?…there must have been some hot read head secretary in the Marvel office they were all trying to bang. 

Anyways, when I was running around in the back yard with my friends pretending to be super heroes, nobody ever picked Daredevil.  How do you pretend to be Daredevil? You pretend to be blind but can see with radar sense?  That’s a stupid power. If you’re Daredevil and another kid sneaks up on you and shoots you in the back with  his repulsors you’re dead.  What are you gonna stop in the middle of the imaginary battle and argue that your radar sense would have told you it was coming? And if you do, then what? Hit him with your imaginary billy club?  This kids pretending he’s Iron Man for f*cks sake.  That imaginary billy club is going right up your butt.

But..If you’re me and you’re pretending to be Power Man you can shrug off the repulsors and throw an imaginary car at him.  Or grab his head can squeeze it like a Mellon and say “I crushed your eye slits shut! you can’t see now!”.  You see what I’m saying?  If you’re pretending to be Daredevil, you are worse off than the kid pretending to be Iron Man after got his helmet crushed, because you’re both blind and have radar but Iron Man can fly way up high so you can’t hit him.  You just have to keep chucking imaginary cars at him and hope he can’t dodge them.  It would have been nice if Power Man could fly, but what are you gonna do?  If someone’s pretending to be the Green Goblin you can steal his glider, but no one ever picked the Green Goblin.  Being Ant-Man was fun because you could declare yourself too small for anyone to see and run up and say “I’m knocking you over from below!” or “I’m big again” punch them and then say “I’m small again!” or  yell “you are all being attack by red ants!”  Plus if you were Ant -Man you could hit girls.

…Dr.Strange is coming out, but I don’t know much about him.  No one ever picked Dr.Strange because he dressed like a ballerina and no one understood what his powers were.  He casts spells…I guess.  That’s not really conducive to running around pretend battling.  I guess you could pretend to open a portal or something..maybe a pretend monster comes out that we all have to fight, but at that point you’re more of an observer of the pretend action than a participant, and that’s no fun.  No one knew what his powers were because we never had any of his books.  I think it must have come out bi-monthly or something because it never seemed to be at the convenience store down the block, where I’d steal comic books.  Now that I’m a grown up I should probably figure out who owned that store and pay them back…except I bet I owe them like 1000 Dollars.  You can fit a crap load of comic books in your snowsuit when no one’s looking.  You just walk in all stiff, like the snow suit is so padded that it’s hard to move, and then you can jam so many comic books into it that it really is hard to move and the clerk won’t look at you twice. Or if it’s summer, you buy a Mad Magazine and shove a couple of comic books in it.  There were no scanners back then so you could just act like you were reading it and show the clerk the cover so he could see the price…and bingo, you walk out with Mad and two comic books for just the price of the Mad. HA hahaaaaa!

I was a real sneaky a-hole as a kid.

Probably the clerk just didn’t give a crap. “congratulations kid, you stole a copy of Marvel Team-up…no one reads that but you anyway, it’s not even really a Spider-Man book, it never has anything to do with the continuity of the rest of the Marvel Universe.”…actually He was probably thinking “I wish this kid would hurry up and steal his comic book and leave so I can go back to reading porn.”  Back then Pornography was in magazine form.  And it was barely even porn.  Like, if you clicked on a porn website and all they had was what passed for porn back then, you’d laugh out loud.  You’d think it was a web site for Mormons or something.

You know what just dawned on me, this kid’s living in the golden age of pornography and he’s on the internet calling some old white guy a racist over a t.v. show. He really needs to get his priorities in order. What a waste of the internet.

I already rattled on for like two pages, I’ll bitch about Luke Cage next time.  In particular how none of the dialogue made any sense and how the initial incident that started the whole thing was a drug dealer who somehow got weaponry from a guy who rivals Tony Stark in the technology department…and goes to sell it for a million dollars.  A million dollars? It’s 2016,  a million dollars gets you some rusty RPGs and a box of land mines.  This is the kinda stuff you sell to China for a billion dollars.  And you sure as f*ck wouldn’t sell it to your rival.  Who the f*ck would sell their rival better weapons than they themselves have?!  And how are both parties in the transaction are so stupid as to get mugged by two teenagers?  There was a problem like this in every single episode.

anyway…that’s next time.

 

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