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Review: Love, Death + Robots (part 1)

Slightly different use of the blog this evening, I'm going to sit and watch/re-watch Netflix's "Love Death + Robots" and air my thoughts, along with trigger warnings and some ranting.

I feel like I should preface this with the fact that this should be 100% my jam... I love animation, I love sci-fi, I love slightly weird shit. Sadly, it has fallen so fucking far from expectations, I kind of feel the need to say something.

Also, there are spoilers galore here. So if you haven't watched it and you want to go into it without any information, this is not the blog post for you.

Some of these, I'm re-watching (I started watching them with a friend, but got sick of all the violence and dicks) and some of them I haven't seen before.
There are also at least 2 that I refuse to re-watch, so you're just going to have to rely on my memory.




Right, first up...
Sonnie's Edge  - warnings for discussion of sexual assault, overly sexualised killing of a female thing by a male thing, gendered slurs, excessive violence and gore

I've been warned about this one, although I've not seen it yet.
Oh yay, dark computer animation. My favourite.
Scumbag rich English dude tries to convince tough scarred up female beast fighter to throw a fight. Her blue haired PoC friend explains to him that she's not fighting the monsters, she's fighting the men who kidnapped, raped and cut her up the year before.
Scumbag rich dude has a pretty, young blonde wife.
Human's sync with beasts and beat the shit out of each other.
Smooth animation and creature designs
There's something unpleasantly sexual about the way that the male monster is positioned to kill the female, until a rather beautiful and vicious moment reminiscent of Unit-01 going on the rampage in Evangelion and she rips his throat out of pulls his head off.
After the fight, the pretty wife visits Sonnie, she envies Sonnies bravery. They talk, and it looks as though they're going to fuck, until the blonde develops claws in her fingers and stabs them up through Sonnie's skull; turns out her creepy scumbag husband was massively pissed that she wouldn't throw the fight. The 'wife' crushes Sonnie's skull in, excessively violently, and the viewers learn that really the body is just a shell; after the assault there wasn't much of a skull left and her friends dumped her consciousness into the beast. Beast!Sonnie kills the wife, again, with a hell of a lot of gore, and it fades to black as the creepy scumbag dude meets his end.
That's her edge, the need to protect herself, rather than just to win.

So this was pretty nicely animated; it was smooth and not too clean, everything looked lived in and 'real'.
Rape as a motivating force is a fucking old and gross trope though, and the way that it seems to be more of a driving force for Sonnie's male friend than for her is especially grim.
Gratuitous boobs, and gratuitous nipples since Sonnie apparently doesn't feel the need to wear a bra.
It had some nice ideas, but in the end, too much skeeviness for me.

Three Robots - warnings for swearing, dead bodies (including one that has obviously committed suicide) and some bleak humour.

Well, we've got a robot. 3 robots, on a sightseeing tour. Ok, this is actually kind of cute.
Robots sight seeing round earth after an apocalypse.
And there's a cat. The robots are investigating the cat; they've activated it! Humans had a game called "exploding kittens" so obviously a real cat will explode.
The culmination of the tour is a nuke. But nukes didn't kill the world; humans just fucked the world up enough. Oh, and they genetically engineered cats to have thumbs.

Ok so that was pretty innocuous. Quite a bit of swearing, cat butts but that's about it. I enjoyed this, and as slave to a feline overlord, I understand the ending well.

(brief detour while I palette cleanse, also damnit my tea has gone cold)

Right, next up...
The Witness - warnings for nudity, violence, could be read as sexual assault

This is another one that I've been warned about.
Woman witnesses a murder from a hotel window, she escapes but the man follows her.
The animation style here is really weird.
He follows her to some kind of sex club? IDK, there's a lot of people in full latex gimp suits and she's a dancer? She ends up naked and realises that he's followed her, which then results in another chase.
The backgrounds are almost realistic, while the people are incredibly stylised; it's disconnected as fuck, but I think given the weirdass narrative, that sort of works.
He ends up chasing her into his apartment, which leads to her killing him, which sets the whole thing in motion again.

Like, if she hadn't been naked but for a very short and open robe, this probably would have been a lot more palatable, but her constant nudity against his being fully clothed made this pretty uncomfortable, especially since the initial shot of her dead body is also pretty sexualised against him desperately trying to catch his breath.

Suits - warnings for some gore, some peril, some swearing.

(no, wait, Jazz needs to shove her bum in my face as I'm not paying her enough attention and the laptop is where she wants to lie)

Aww, cute farmer couple. I kinda like the style here, and lord knows I love me some mecha. I also love him with his cup of tea in the mech.
Eeew, aliens coming through a breach.
Aww, another cute farmer couple. And a badass grumpy old lady farmer.
I don't know what these critters are but they're gross.
And this is actually pretty full of badass ladies who all fucking survive.
Oh wow, so the final shot, you see they're actually on a whole other world, and the breaches are actually breaches in the bio-dome that they live in, and there are millions of the creatures outside. Which is actually pretty depressing, as it means that there's not really any chance that that will be the last time they have to have that fight.

I kinda liked that. Not all the way, but the animation style was nice (if kind of jarring against the subject matter) and it was a solid little story without unnecessary rape, nudity or violence.

Sucker of Souls - warnings for extreme gore, lots of swearing, so many penii, cat fucking, a lot of sexual humour (some of it pretty crude), gendered slurs
(this is where I started a few weeks ago)

Archaeological dig untombs something that should not have been disturbed; it kills the foreign exchange student, while the mercenary snipes at the professor and then there's a bloody chase through some catacombs.
Turns out it's Vlad Dracul, and it's very not human. It also hates cats.
There's lots of chasing through more catacombs, two cats fucking on a support beam, and explosions, and just when you think they're all going to be ok, it turns out that they're actually in a room full of the weird vampire things as it fades to black.
Gary is basically my old Stargate RPG character; everything is better with more C4 and detcord.
What I'm assuming is meant to be a Scots accent is appalling, but this does have an excellent "eating pussy" joke. It sadly also has a dick growing out of a hole where a dick had previously been blown off with a shotgun, which really, no one needed.

I do like the slightly sketchy storybook style. It kind of works with the extreme violence. There is a lot of dick in this one. And so much blood under very high pressure.
Like, not terrible, but on a scale of ok to "oh god who let this be released to the world" that probably isn't the greatest comment.

When the Yogurt Took Over - warnings for brief nudity, suicide, so much weirdness, yogurt
(another rewatch)

This is a weird one, with the added weirdness of it being narrated by Brain (of Pinky and the Brain)
I don't really know what to say about this to be honest. It's kinda funny, a little bit bleak, and pretty true to form, that politicians don't listen to anyone.

I wasn't keen on the animation style, but it was well done. And the voice over really made it suitably weird.

Beyond the Aquila Rift - warnings for nudity, sex, body horror, really fucking weird looking aliens, existential dread.
(I have seen this before and refuse to re-watch it as it hist a couple of very major brain stops for me)

A crew of 3 set a course on their ship and get into their stasis pods. Awakening some undefined length of time later, the captain is greeted by a woman in a white space suit, who, when she removes her helmet, he recognises as Greta. His female pilot wakes, but has issues coming out of stasis, so she's put back in. Something seems to niggle at the back of the captain's head, but he goes on board the station with Greta, as she tells him that they went off course slightly, and are stuck on a station deep in space.
They fuck. A lot, lots of full frontal nudity, and it's beautifully rendered. But it's all kind of unnecessary.
Eventually he gets angry at her evasiveness, and she admits that they're stranded a lot further out than she originally admitted, and that even though they were only in stasis for 4 months of stasis time, they're actually over 100 years away from earth, and going home really isn't an option.
He goes back to the ship and wakes his pilot, and they both get pretty angry, but when Greta comes on board, the pilot is adamant that there's something not right about her, until Greta sedates her back into her pod.
The captain is more and more aware that something isn't right, and after more sex, he forces Greta to show him what's really going on; she is adamant that he isn't ready to know, but he gets increasingly violent. He wakes from his pod, and we see that he's much older, malnourished and his clothes are rags; his two crewmates are dead in their pods, and the remains of the ship are wrapped in webs. We see Greta, actually some weird, arachnid like alien who honestly reminds me of The Stalk from the comic series Saga, only this one has no humanoid parts, and what looks like a vaginal orifice in its 'chest'. As the shot pans out, it turns out that the whole station isn't so much a station as some kind of construct created by these weird arachnid things. The Greta creature implies that this isn't the first time that a ship has ended up there, and there are definitely more ship carcasses partially visible. The captain screams, and everything goes black, and he wakes up again as he had the first time, to find Greta welcoming him to the station. The shot pans out again and while it briefly looks like a proper space station, the shot flickers to see the weird web like construct.

Ok, so if I'd watched this alone, this would have done a number on my head. The idea of being that lost in space, and that adrift from when you should be is utterly terrifying to me, and the whole creature warping the minds of lost and stranded travellers also kind of messes with me.
This was also just unnecessarily full of sex and nudity, and before anyone accuses me of being a prude, I like sex, I like nudity, there's just like, a limit.
This was also utterly created for a male gaze, and just, eugh. The captain was a rough, rugged looking manly man, his pilot was a short haired, slightly grumpy woman, and the third member of his crew was a black man who I don't think actually had any lines. Greta on the other hand was lovingly rendered, from the curves of her spacesuit to her naked body, with a clingy black dress that defied gravity in between.

I just, it felt skeevy, and I think I'm done thinking about it to be honest.

Good Hunting - warnings for rape, racism, gross colonial attitudes, non-consensual body modification, sex work, violence
(again, I'm not re-watching this)

I hate this one. It's stunningly beautiful, but it's just gross.
Set in some vaguely Victorian-ish China, a boy grows up to be a spirit hunter, going with his father to trap and kill a huli jing (a kind of fox spirit_ which has ensnared a local merchant. They chase the fox spirit to it's home, where the boy finds its daughter, who tries to explain that her mother didn't ensnare the merchant, she became tied to him as he became more and more obsessed. Their parents catch up and have a fight, in which the boys father kills the adult huli jing.
The father eventually dies years later, and the boy keeps track of the young huli jing, Yan, who, as industrialisation progresses, finds that she is less and less able to change her form from human to fox. He eventually moves to the city and works on the trains and trams, all while suffering under the English colonial oppression.
One day he spots Yan being groped by a group of top hatted and monocle wearing Englishmen, and tries to chase them off, he succeeds, and the two talk; she confesses that she can no longer shift forms at all, and has to rely on selling her body to earn any money. He tries to help but she refuses and they part ways.
He becomes an engineer and builds beautiful steampunk creations, and then one day, Yun returns, to reveal that everything below her neck is now machine; her 'patron' could only get it up for machinery, and so had her altered. She killed him in a rage, and now wants the man's help to rebuild her body; she longs to be able to shift and hunt again.
He agrees, and rebuilds her entirely; when it's complete, she shifts from human to a multi-tailed fox, and he bids her good hunting as she vanishes into the city to hunt down men attacking women.

I. Look. The animation is stunning. It really is. But it's a veneer on a gross story of rape, loss of bodily autonomy and colonial oppression. It's incredibly explicit, to the point of doing it for shock value, and really, just, ugh.
Also steampunk; I think most people know how I feel about steampunk (I hate it) and this is kind of an exaggeration of all the reasons I hate it.


I wanted to try and get a couple more done, but the cat is being a butt and and I need to sleep.
I'll try and do the rest over the weekend.

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