Watchmen for Normies

Heckel's Journal, August 30th, 2024. I keep seeing this ugly ass show people are calling Kino.

The most intelligent thing The Boys' writer was able to muster was deconstructing superheroes, which Watchmen and the Incredibles beat him to many years prior. Even the Incredibles had nuance, and Watchmen was thoughtfully true to aspects of American history. All the Boys has is gay guy dialogue and shitting on Christianity; real fucking original in these times. Anybody can deconstruct something; I'd like to see him even conceive of something organic. When you're completely devoid of originality, the only thing you can do is add gratuitous violence, because normies will confuse being shocked with being impressed—Not just gratuitous violence, but weird, unrealistic violence which reminds me of atrocity propaganda from 2023.

I didn't have to look this up before knowing it. 

Just as I suspected, the show's writer, Eric Kripke, is from Ohio. Every goddamn time. 

The lighting is awful. I've been trying to make shorts for a week now, and one thing I've noticed is that the more lather you put on something the shoddier and less professional it looks. Most things are adequate as god made them. Editor attempts to be a smarty pants by tampering with things like lighting make the show harder to look at with how sepia and flat it is. Turn off the Instagram filters and admit you need lessons. Chiaroscuro, look it up. There's a point where you have to think, maybe the cover isn't clip out art because it's stylistic, but because of the competency crisis, modern graphic designers aren't skilled enough to make anything beyond it.

The sound effects are inexcusable. Wasn't this on Amazon? How did any of this get past post? It's the same cheap sound effects you've heard before, and they aren't even professionally integrated.

They made sure to gay up the cast, and I mean this not in a homosexual way, but as in one of the characters looks like Hasan Piker. It's TikTok-core, where people are meant to look natural, but are still evident of skincare, with puffy hair fixed in a stiff position, letting you know they just got out of a touch up room. This wouldn't be complete without its verbal equivalent. The dialogue is insufferable. It's hard to listen to people nasally warble in sarcasm, even when they aren't being sarcastic. Primarily because its human nature to pick up emotion from nodes of emphasis, of which the characters have none. You get strained after a minute of trying to keep up with it.

Whenever there's a war criminal throughout history, a PR department will come up with the most obvious thing by calling them "the Butcher of" whatever. That's immediately what I thought of when I heard about the Billy Butcher character from a friend. They heard Bill the Butcher from Gangs of New York at some point, and recycled it Later. If I was trying to write a British character, I'd definitely get someone with a half Australian accent who looks Armenian. 

His tough guy veneer is immediately disintegrated as soon as they make him lecture a priest, with this effeminate long winded BuzzFeed vocabulary. People don't naturally talk in skeptic word salads, and even if they could, why would anybody want to. Calling God a "cunt" is profoundly less edgy than saying the N word right now.

The Homelander Character mumbles his lines as if unsure of his own confidence; maybe that's why all the self help fags use him in Sigma shorts.

Looking at the comic, which is much visually clearer, I now get that it's making fun of 50s white masculinity. Maybe this was less stale back in 2006. There is truth in undermining American patriotism with an interpretation of the military industrial complex, although I doubt the show's writer is read on any of that. I think he just glommed onto a popular trope. The specific source material is obviously Superman, with his laser eyes. I get it, we're making fun of the old white architype—however Superman had black hair, not blonde; he had a Hebrew sounding name (Kal-El) and an origin story based off of Moses. Plus the two guys who wrote him were minorities, depending on how you look at it.

So if by Kino you mean visual HIV, then yes it is Kino, It's Chemo, positive, for normies, but not for real people. Go watch Watchmen, go watch Sin City, go Watch The Maxx... Spawn, take your pick.