Final Boss Week

Wow, it’s May already?

Here’s what’s new with me.

(Spoilers for Endgame and GoT follow…)

COMIC.

I’ve done more writing than drawing this month. I have the entirety of the first nine issues of Cold Reset scripted. 184 pages long. Took me a fair few days to smash that out but I’m stopping there for now. My plan is to get it printed in a little book I can keep around, and refer to, and make notes in… Better than having a big thick stack of A4 papers in a binder.

I’ve been working on the comic here and there, but I’ve been a little distracted by videogames and TV. This is how I work – I have a solid few months of doing nothing but drawing, all day every day; then I follow it up with a month or two of barely any drawing. Perfectly balanced.

As all things should be.

Speaking of which:

MOVIES.

Avengers fucking Endgame.

I went to the midnight premiere, knowing full well that 3am would be way too late/early to process everything I was seeing. So I obviously saw it again the next day. And damn, it’s even better the second time!

I loved everything. The 5 year time jump really was the icing on the cake, so many interesting and funny moments. They had so much freedom with it and they did a great job. So many things I wasn’t expecting.

And when 2014-Thanos arrived at the end, and his army was there in full force, and everything seemed lost… “On your left.”

FUCK. SO GOOD. I can’t even think about it without feeling that sheer adrenaline rush that hit me in the cinema. And the music…

What a perfect movie. An actual (almost) perfect movie. I had one or two extremely minor issues with it, but I won’t get into it. I want to enjoy living in this beautiful age, this post-Endgame era.

I’ll be seeing it again in 2 days time. Gotta make the most of it being here before the long wait for the Bluray. Damn.

So good.

I also managed to watch both Interstellar and The Martian for the first time. I don’t know why I left them for so long, but I did. I loved them both. Interstellar was more of a touching story between father and daughter, but the cool wormhole/time travel stuff that initially grabbed my attention was done well.

And that sequence with the ship entering the wormhole, and what that looked like, with all the light bending around the sphere… Wow. Must have been tough to break that down in the pre-production.

The Martian was more along the lines of what I was expecting. But I still enjoyed it. Being stuck on a planet with Matt Damon is always a neat concept. He has crazy-good banter with himself, and the way everything turned out was neato. Was satisfying.

Another one I saw recently was a little film about the Norwegian Black Metal scene in the late 80s/early 90s, called Lords of Chaos.

Super dark stuff, and it’s a story I vaguely read about a few years ago. Weird to see it acted out, and in such graphic detail. The murder scenes especially were quite jarring. It’s not often you see a murder scene that is filmed in a way that connects you to the killer and makes you feel every single second of the death process. Pretty interesting film though, even if the real life Varg disputes like 99% of it. Would watch again.

MUSIC.

I’ve been catching up with a bunch of metal lately. There is new music from Eluveitie, Tyr, Månegarm and Trollfest. And I’ve also been catching up with some older stuff from Amorphis, Rotting Christ, Saor…

It’s been chill. My walks to and from work have been full of colourful metal.

More below.

GAMES.

I quite enjoyed the Legacy of the First Blade DLC for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Not often that a DLC extends the storyline and adds new twists that you wouldn’t know about by just playing the base game. I’ve started Fate of Atlantis too, so stay tuned lol.

One of the free games this month on PS Plus was The Surge. Which surprised me with how enjoyable it is. Like a cyberpunk Dark Souls. I had a lot of fun playing it, and was originally aiming for the platinum trophy. Just as I finished my New Game+ run and started on a New Game++ to get the final trophy I needed, the game crashed and my save file corrupted. Meaning, I lost everything. And now, if I want the platinum trophy, I have to restart the game from the very beginning and find a pair of sunglasses in the game. That’s it. That’s all that’s left. And it sucks.

That may sound like a trivial issue to you. And it is. But still, I was raging.

Days Gone is pretty alright. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time playing it yet, but I like the vibes. A bit like a Daryl Dixon Simulator. I’ll push on.

TV.

Started looking at Part 2 of Sabrina, but haven’t really gone back to it since they started the girl turning into a boy storyline. It’s just awkward and unrealistic, the way the other characters treat her and stuff. Not really for me.

The Walking Dead was surprisingly good this season. I really like the show’s new direction, and the finale was strong. Excited to see what happens next.

But the big one, lads. Game of Thrones.

I was hyped as fuck for the battle of Winterfell episode. For weeks and weeks. Some Endgame-level stuff coming our way. And directed by the battle of the bastards guy. How could it possibly not be a perfect 80 minutes of TV??

Like that, I guess.

The battle was enjoyable, don’t get me wrong. But I had a hard time seeing what was going on, and by the second half of the episode, it was clear who was safe from death. They teased this episode as ‘making the Red Wedding look like a rehearsal dinner’ but we lost, like, nobody.

There were stupid decisions made by both the heroes and villains throughout the episode. And Jon screamed at a zombie dragon for some reason. Bran was useless again. Sam should be dead – the wights took down the entire Dothraki army and most of the Unsullied, and yet Sam (who was constantly covered in wights whenever we saw him) survived the whole thing.

Jaime and Brienne bossed their side of the battle, but it’s super lame that only the named characters were left standing. Like I was watching an anime battle.

Jorah died for nothing. All he had to do was run with Daenerys and they would have been fine. Theon died for nothing. If Bran really foresaw what would happen, he should have told Theon to go away. Arya singlehandedly took down the Night King using a classic assassin trick that I feel like I see all the time in movies and TV…

Overall, it’s mega disappointing that it’s over. With 3 episodes left. I get it, Cersei is the threat now, blah blah. But now, Cersei will never know how close she came to being invaded by the dead. Now she will be all smug – “A little girl killed this big army of the dead you were worried about. I guess they were never a threat after all.” She owes her life to the guys at Winterfell and she’ll never know it.

And all this time, the show has been trying to push Jon’s underdog warning – that the throne doesn’t matter if there’s nobody left to sit on it. For a couple of seasons now, that’s been it, right? It’s not about the politics and the family honour, it’s about surviving. It’s about the living against the dead.

But now the show has pulled the rug from under itself and undermined years of buildup by completely ending the White Walker threat just like that. A single shiv to the kidneys and it’s all over.

Anti-climactic.

Also why didn’t fire kill the Night King? And why didn’t Beric resurrect with all the other dead good guys? Why didn’t the Night King just wait in the sky on his dragon until only Bran was left alive? And why was there only ONE giant in the entire undead army?

I’ll stall my rant for now, because there are 3 episodes left and, I guess, anything can happen. But I have my predictions. What I think should happen, and what I think will happen. The show isn’t the complex, interesting and unique tale it started out as. Likely because we stopped following George R.R. Martin’s story 2 years ago. These new guys just don’t have the spark, do they?

SONG OF THE DAY.