Gladiator and The Fall of The Roman Empire

I finally saw Gladiator, it was a passable revenge fantasy action film.  What's interesting is it's lineage.

1964's The Fall of The Roman Empire is a movie inspired by Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire, in particular his thesis that the reign of Commodus was the beginning of the end.  It's a heavily fictionalized account, streamlining things to work as a Shakespearean Tragedy.  But what would be interesting for someone better at this kind of analysis then me to do in a video essay is break down how even what it changes is done to serve Gibbon's overall premise.

Gibbon's book is probably the most influential history book of it's era.  Many later history books about other empires ape the name, yes he pretty much invented the entire trend of saying "decline and fall of ____" in and of itself.

Actual historical fiction isn't the only fiction inspired by it, it was part of the inspiration for Isaac Asimov's Foundation series which in turn influenced Star Wars making it important to the development of Science Fiction.  And one of the many ambitious ideas in my head I'll probably never get to realize is an alternate history where Rome doesn't fall because Commodus was successfully overthrown by his sister, the present narrative I imagined for that project had perhaps a little too much direct inspiration from Code Geass.

It shows what a unique kind of nerd I am that I'd read a good deal of Gibbon before I saw any fiction depicting Commodus.  Currently I no longer remember most of the specifics of what he said.  But it also says something about me that I was born in 1985 and yet saw the 1964 movie a long time ago while only got to Gladiator within the last week.

I like TFOTRE, it's got a darker vibe then most of the old Historical Epics, yet still feels like an epic in a way most of these modern mostly Gladiator inspired gritty ancient history films do not.  One scene that sticks with me is where after Commodus becomes Emperor these representatives of the Eastern Provinces come to ask him for relief and he in turn says he's going to be even harsher on them.  I remember it because of how it echos Rehoboam in 1 Kings and 2 Chronicles and why the Northern Kingdom seceded.

Gladiator is clearly on some level inspired by the 1964 film.  It is historically inaccurate in a lot of the exact same ways, and doesn't mention barely any historical facts or ideas you can't get from it or Spartacus.  But is clearly much more interested in being a comic book superhero origin story set in Rome then it is in communicating with what that movie was actually about.  There is some lip service given to Roman politics but it feels mostly hollow and the film ends with the impression that Rome is going to be better now, which whether you agree with Gibbon's thesis or not clearly didn't happen.

I'm by no means against something having a happier ending then it's source material.  But Gladiator doesn't feel much like it earned anything about it's ending.

The year before Gladiator came out another movie drew inspiration from 1964's The Fall of The Roman Empire.  There is a clear homage to it at the end of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  I've been a fan of both these movies for years yet it took someone else to point out their connection to me.  But in this case it's a reference being made with the intent of referencing what that movie is about, in this case it's the beginning of the end of the Republic, but it echos the same idea.

I'm mostly just annoyed we have two major Hollywood films about Commodus but Marcia is in neither...... wait....... that Wikipedia page has been changed to now saying she had Christian "sympathies", are the conservatives uncomfortable with counting someone like her as one of us finally noticing she exists?

Anime 2020 plans, or rather lack of

Magia Record episode 9 made a pretty clever artistic choice for it's flashback sequence, I'm quite impressed.

Healin'Good PreCure episode 12 was pretty good.

I started the Anime 2020 project partly so I could have something to update this blog with every week even when I'm slow on other inspiration, or focusing more on the more strictly Religious Blogs.  So this Pandemic pretty much putting on hold most of what I was watching is a real monkey wrench for my plans.

I don't know if Magia Record's Dub will be back to doing an episode every week or if episode 9 here was a one off to finish that two parter.  Either way two episodes a week isn't much to blog on unless one gives me a particularly above average amount to say.

I'm not gonna worry about it though.  I have some posts I've been wanting to make, I just need to stop being lazy about them.

Maybe I'll post about the Code Geass movie again once I've re-watched it some, who knows.

Code Geass: Lelouch of The Resurrection

I was naturally a little apprehensive about the prospect of bringing back Code Geass, of potentially ruining what I consider the best most satisfying ending in all of Anime and perhaps all of Speculative fiction.  And when it was made clear only a year had passed I got worried.

But in the end the movie was very good.

I watched the Dub of course.  Early on a couple VAs were sounding like maybe they were having trouble getting back into these characters.  Of course in my most recent re-watching of Code Geass material Kallen kind of doesn't feel the same to me anymore as I've gotten used to that voice in other Anime usually playing older characters.

Mostly though once any character was fully back in action it felt like a old friend returning, but still changed by their development.

I recommend it to all Code Geass fans.  Now for the Spoilers.

Pilot Episodes in Anime and American TV

The Three Episode rule is a concept that exists in the Anime community allegedly to account for the fact that first episodes will often be weak and so you need to give a show a bit of a chance to prove itself.

The irony of this being thought of as an inherently Anime things is I feel Anime first episodes generally have a better track record then American TV, even though all those hour long dramas I've watched had twice the runtime to work with.

Now for both Anime and American TV there are lots of older cases where because of how I got into them the first episode was not my actual first impression of the show.  Buffy and Angel are the big western example though I can also add One Tree Hill, but for Anime this was even more common applying to Sailor Moon, Pokemon, (ya know I still haven't properly seen the first episode of DBZ), Noir, Madlax, Wedding Peach, Code Geass, Gundam 00 and even as recently as Attack On Titan.

Witch Hunter Robin might actually be the first TV Anime where I actually watched the first episode first because I just bought the complete box set on a whim.  Maybe that's why it plays such a unique hard to define role in my Anime Nostalgia.

Since I started becoming more of a full time Anime viewer in 2014 I've generally avoided letting this happen, I literally won't let myself watch a random Toonami episode, which is perhaps unfairly limiting.  So by now the majority of my MAL are shows where the first episode was indeed my first impression.  And as you can see skimming my dropped list I don't always follow the 3 episode rule, but I'm a rule breaker by nature.

When The Vampire Diaries started was before that.  That show I did watch as it aired from the start until the middle of season 5 because I was in my Vampire phase then.  And I wasn't the only early fan of the show telling people that the Pilot wasn't a great first impression and you really need to give it a few to really get a proper sense of if you'd be into it or not.

The Passion of The Nerd in his video on Buffy's Pilot attempts to argue it's better then the pilots of a lot of other TV shows, with the examples listed/shown all being American.  That segment of the video amused me, because as much of a Buffy fanboy as I was, comparing Welcome to The Hellmouth to most Anime Pilots absolutely makes Buffy come up short.

Now it might sound like this is an argument of someone agaisnt the 3 Episode Rule.  But you see Anime is of inherently such high quality to me that their Pilots can be better then other Pilots but still below the average quality of the shows they're piloting. What I've done here is point out that pilots having issues is a universal thing, and Anime given the chaotic way it's often produced is not gonna be immune to that.  And I'm someone who's notoriously easy to please anyway.

The reason why with Anime it's often 3 episodes specifically is because back in the 90s the Home Video releases were usually of three episode sets, and the Anime industry typically made more of it's money back on the home releases then when the show actually aired.  So the shows were written with the assumption many will watch all of the first 3 together regardless, and to in general work in three episode chunks well beyond how it starts.

My first viewing of the opening episodes of Pokémon was via watching that three episode VHS tape.  And those episodes do feel like a three act story in how they set up the show's premise and world, followed by episode 4 being almost the first filler episode.  Suede has pretty positive reviews of both the 1st and 3rd episodes but was more critical of the second, I think the second was phenomenal, but I'm more into unconventional story structuring in general.

For Sailor Moon however the west didn't get the same experience Japan did since it's second episode was also the first one skipped by DiC.  When you watch it's original opening trio it has a similar vibe with episode two introducing a few things the Manga did in the first chapter and then episode 3 introducing the Lunar Pen.

And even though those technical reasons for this structuring of how to start a show don't apply anymore, the people making Anime often default to that out of habit.  Code Geass came out firmly in the DVD era but it's first 3 episodes are very much the same effect.

SFDebris's reviews of Madoka Magica observed how it's structured as 4 sets of 3 episodes.  Madoka however may ironically have been the end of this being a consistent pattern in how Anime is made.  Since after Madoka a lot of shows have made a deliberate effort to wait more then three episodes before taking their Mami's head off.

However some shows still follow that pattern to this day.  Citrus had basically the exact same 4 sets of 3 episodes structure going for it.  And it early on had to condense two chapters of Manga into one for the second episode to make that work.

A lot of people dismissing the three episode rule like Digibro's three part video series on the issue or Zeria in a recent twitter threat, I don't think can actually honestly remember what their actual first impression of the first episode was.  They are always looking at episode one in the context of what the show became.  I say this as someone who when it comes to what I currently consider my favorite Western TV show, Pretty Little Liars, absolutely don't trust my current memories of how I feel about it's pilot, that show made every detail of that pilot iconic to long time fans in how it constantly referenced back to it.

If there is literally nothing about the first episode you liked then sticking for two more probably won't be worth it.  But if you see potential then give the show more of a chance.

Update April 2021: This new Pause and Select Video helps further explain the reasons for the 3 Episode rule.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nhtm2TS99ko

SAO Alicization War Of Underworld Season 1 has finished airing on Toonami

I thought I would have more to say, I really don't.

I'm mostly a fan of SAO as it was.  But Alicization has this weird quality of both moving too slowly and doing too much at once.

Maybe Season 2 will pay all this off well now that the set up is basically done.

I've given it a positive rating on MAL because I've enjoyed lots of scenes.  But maybe that's a bad way to rate something.

An Interesting Dilemma about wanting to write Historical Fiction.

One of my ambitions if I ever get to become a successful Hollywood Film maker or TV show maker or Anime maker or whatever, is to make the first major popular dramatization of the Maccabees Revolt.  I'm amazed it hasn't been done already frankly.

Thing is the purpose of such a depiction would not be just to be a history lesson.  Indeed the main selling point is it as the origin of Hanukkah, a Holiday everyone knows about.  And because of that I feel kind of obligated to depict the Miracle of the cruse of oil even though I personally believe that incident is ahistorical.

Now I want to clarify something.  I don't disbelieve this story because it's a miracle, I am a Christian, and a Continuationist, I don't think God's supernatural interventions in Human History are limited to those directly documented in the Canonical Scriptures.  I don't consider 2 Maccabees Scripture but I am inclined to believe every Supernatural event it records did in fact happen.

But that's just it, 2 Maccabees doesn't record this one.  If it was only 1 Maccabees that failed to mention it then I could observe how that book doesn't record any supernatural events so it's authors(s) must have not wanted to bring them up.  But 2 Maccabees records a few miracles, so if this story already existed when 2 Maccabees was written then 2 Maccabees would absolutely have recorded it.

So that above reasoning has been in my mind for years now.  But recently I noticed something that makes the historicity of this story even more impossible.  I observed recently in posts I made on other Blogs I run that 1 Maccabees 1:21-24 records Antiochus Epiphanes removing the Menorah and other Sacred Treasures from The Temple and taking them back to his "homeland" by which they probably mean Antioch.  Then 1 Maccabees 4:47-49 tells us Judas Maccabeus created all new replacements for the re-dedication of The Temple.  It is this Menorah and Table of Showbread depicted on the Arch of Titus, not the Mosaic or Solomonic ones, the base of that Menorah gives away how it's clearly a Hellenistic era design not the Biblical design.

This detail of the Maccabees narrative renders the Oil Miracle nonsensical.  The notion that it'd be so symbolically tragic for the Menorah to stop burning even for one night is meaningless when you realize the Menorah had flat out not even been in there for three years.  At best wanting to include both this fact and this miracle makes Judas look rather dumb for not having lots of Oil produced while the new Menorah was being made.

This story doesn't show up till the Babylonian Talmud, the younger of the two Talmuds, both well into the AD era.  It's in the Megilat Antiochus but that source is very young with a very bad understanding of the history in-question (it treats all of the Seleucid rulers as one single Antiochus).

Yet it has become what Hanukkah is actually about to most people observing it today.  Likewise if I make a movie about the Nativity Narrative and followed my interpretation of the text that Jesus wasn't born in the stable of an inn because no one was willing to house Mary and Joseph but rather in a nice house that Joseph owned, I'll have removed like 70% of what American Christianity considers the point of the story.

Now my ideas for Historical fiction always adds things, I want to expand what we do know from the sources and add my own creative ideas.  But I hold myself to a standard I don't always hold other historical fiction to in that I generally don't want to depict anything that we can prove didn't happen.

For example.  In this case I'm going to write Lesbians into the story somehow because I can't write anything without Lesbians.  I want to have a woman claiming to be a Meanad play the Exotic Femme Fatale role that is practically a required cliche of this genre.  I want to give Cleopatra II some screen time because I'm just personally a big fan of her, I will be historically accurate in casting an authentic Ginger to play her.  I might write an Amazon into it.  And if anyone is starting to go "you seem oddly more interested in the Greek stuff then Jewish stuff" don't worry I have plenty of ideas for the Jewish side too, like how I'll draw inspiration from The Fiddler On The Roof.

Which is why including the Oil Miracle wasn't really a problem when it was only the lack of reference that had me doubting it's historicity.  But now that I have seen clear evidence it didn't happen I'm truly conflicted about the issue.  Especially as I now want to depict these objects being taken by Antiochus since I see some interesting implications in them winding up at Antioch.

Post Script: On the sources I'd use.

I'd be mainly using both 1 and 2 Maccabees and Josephus and maybe also the book known as 4 Maccabees.  3 Maccabees is confusingly not actually about the Maccabees at all and I have reasons for considering it completely Ahistorical anyway.

While I refereed to a bias I believe 1 Maccabees has, it is the older text and so I will trust it over 2 Maccabees if I come across any truly irreconcilable contradiction between them.  Josephus being seemingly unaware of 2 Maccabees is evidence of how young it is.

However in the case of seeming inconsistencies between the standard version of 1 Maccabees and the version of it Josephus was using as source material for this time period in Antiquities of The Jews, I think Josephus probably had a version closer to the original.  Still some details unique to Josephus could be things he's adding from elsewhere.  

In Antiquities Josephus flat out admits he got some stuff wrong in Wars of The Jews that he is now correcting.

That this history is fulfilling prophecies from Daniel will also be mentioned.  I also like to connect Hanukkah to Haggai 2, Zechariah 4, Leviticus 24 and Numbers 8.

Details we know about Antiochus Epiphanes from Polybus and Livy will also be considered.

I also have some interesting theories about how the Book of Judith might relate to this history.   Of course the defeat of Nicanor is something we probably wouldn't get to till a Sequel.