Entertainment

“I am Moana.”

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I’m having fun doing reviews, though I don’t do them exactly like how people generally do, but that’s fine, because I figure if someone wants to know about the cast, the score, and the rating, there’s a bunch of other sites that tell them better than I can.

So, as my title says, I want to talk about Moana.

Everybody, including me, went into Moana with high expectations, except those who hate Disney Princess movies, and they went in with that expectation.

I will say from the beginning that the advertisers never should have marketed this movie as something made by the creators of Frozen. Frozen is hard to replicate for its own screen writers (have you seen that horrible short that came with the 2015 Cinderella?) let alone for other people.

I tried hard not to watch the movie with a Frozen bias, but I realized that I couldn’t help myself, the result was, upon first watch, I really disliked it.

But now I’ve had plenty of time to reconsider, and I’ve had my sister give me a lot of reasons why the movie was not as bad as I thought, and I liked some of the songs; and the long and short of it is, I have changed my mind.

Now, the people who say (and there are many) that this movie is better than Frozen, are completely wrong. From the first moments of the film there is a different tone and style to it than Frozen, Moana herself is nothing like either Elsa or Anna, and she has no special power, there is not threat form the elements. Plus, Moana is based off of a myth, not a fairytale, and the writers and animators did a good job of making the whole thing feel like a legend.

So, since this is the case, Moana is not actually the same kind of story as Frozen, and comparing the two in that light, is not fair to either.

Just in case you haven’t seen it and don’t plan to (Spoiler alert!) I’ll outline the story. Moana is the daughter of the village chief of an island in Hawaii, not yet called that, of course. she had a love for the sea, that her father discourages for reasons of his own, but Moana can’t help herself. Then we find out the Ocean chose her to be the one to save her people. As we are told in the opening minutes of the film the heart of Tafiti, the Polynesian goddess of creation, was stolen by the demigod Maui, and that brought a curse of decay and death over the world, which now finds its way to Moana’s island. Realizing this, and with some pushing and revelation from her crazy Grandma, Moana finally sets out to restore the heart, despite various setbacks. She finds Maui, they team up, and after a lot of monsters and storms, and Te Ka, the lava monster, Moana figures out how to restore the heart, and succeeds. (You knew she would.)

Okay, so what is negative in all this?

Well, though the story works a lot of the time, it unfortunately breaks down whenever Maui is acting less than demigodly.  Also, some parts of it are a little rushed, not very well explained, and why did we need that dumb chicken? But that’s a personal preference, not an actual plot problem.

I have to admit, the movie has no real plot holes, but it has plot rubbish. Maui may be the most unnecessary additional character that I’ve ever seen as part of the whole. But what I really had a hard time forgiving the movie for was that Maui and some other parts, constantly took away the mythic feel of the whole thing. They made it seem cheesy and too aimed at a young audience, and a young audience with low standards at that. The humor was just stupid at many times, and often it was modern, which threw off the movie because the whole point is to feel like you’re way back in time, watching the whole legend unfold before your eyes.

Moana is not the first modern Disney Princess movie to use modern humor, Tangled did in some ways, I’ve seen other movies do it and it worked fine, like Shrek. But those other movies were set up with a much simpler plot that would not suffer from that kind of humor, while Moana, form its conception, is supposed to feel more timeless.

I may be overstating my case, but the importance of this factor really cannot be stressed too much, I winced every time the movie got too modern, because, if I wanted to hear modern jokes, I’d watch a Dreamworks movie or a TV show, for crying out loud, I watch Disney to get away from that.

It doesn’t bother everyone the way it bothers me, but whether it bothers you or not, it does change the tone of the movie and that’s going to affect the quality.

Enough with the negative. What changed my mind about this movie was two things: The first was of course, Moana herself.

I’ve got to hand it to Auli, she kept this character grounded. Moana never is ruined by the stupid jokes, or unnecessary humor around her, she stays down to earth and passionate the entire time, and manages to sell innocent and shrewd at the same time. I have no problem with her character at all, and I would have liked her even better without the plot problems that were not her fault.

The other thing will not surprise anyone who has seen it: The Ocean.

I think the climax of this movie is one of the best parts, but the only thing that made Maui and Hei Hei bearable for me was Moana and the Ocean working together. The Ocean actually behaved just as I would expect it to if it were a conscious creature, and that was what really sold me on the plot. If the Ocean had been too nice, or too magical, it would have felt fake and contrived, but the Ocean being unpredictable and very real at times made it work. I was most into Moana’s head when the Ocean proved more dangerous than she expected, and when she almost gave up, because it was a natural feeling.

I can’t get into the meaning of the movie in this part, so I’ll do it in part two, until then–Natasha.

The Hunger Games–part 2

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Okay, so after reviewing The Hunger Games, I drew one lesson from it. (If you don’t like drawing lessons from things, you’re reading the wrong review.)

The lesson is this: The movie is parodying the media.

I never knew this from what I was told or the few clips I’d seen before, but the whole driving force behind the games is the Media. They run it like that show “Survivor.” Except, there are no volunteers (I don’t count Katniss and the two other “volunteers” because being in the games is still a forced thing,) and the people must kill each other instead of learning how to work together.

Other than those two insignificant facts, the games could be any kind of survival show. The people behind them rig them with extra challenges because the kids being at each other’s throats is not enough, and they monitor the whole thing. There is no escaping, no quitting, nothing.

If the kids did not have to fight each other, their combined skills might be enough to escape and defy the elitists who were forcing this on them. At the very least they might die together, and retain their humanity. (I would’ve like that movie better.) That would be an inspiring story, and more true to what history teaches us about the overthrow of evil.

But not even Katniss thinks of such an idea, and it is never broached.

Think, if the kids had all seen the horror of what they were being compelled to do, they could have made a real statement by refusing with one accord to do it. there would have been repercussions, but if the movie had made it clear that it was the right thing to do, the kids could have overcome them.

Is there any doubt it was the right thing to do?

It’s true some of those kids were evil and demented, but they were that because they had grown up believing these games were their destiny, and that they were prepared to kill. Even if those kids had refused to change their minds, they could have been outnumbered by those who showed more humanity.

Katniss would have been a real hero had she convinced them to rebel against the idea of the hunger games, but we are never given any hint that the idea is even conceivable for them.

Because the games get their districts benefits.

The system is effectively evil, but after 75 years, you’d think someone would get fed up.

But the people have been convinced that this is entertainment. That it’s normal to take an interest in it.  Gale ha the right idea, everyone should stop watching. Katniss shoots that down, wont’ even try it. Don’t people go on strike in this world?

So, it really is the Media controlling it all. The sad thing is, the Media can only control compliant people. People may not listen to plain common sense, but they’ll listen to what someone on TV says.

WE all know better, but it’s easier to listen to Media and ignore our conscience.

Folks, what you see on TV is often no better than the Hunger Games.

There are dozens of shows that involve murder in every single episode, and many more involve crime in each one.

There have been scores of shows that show people disrespecting each other horribly, constantly, while laugh tracks are playing. Even some good kid shows still fall prey to that type of humor. I repeat, the good ones.

There are many more shows than I ever  thought possible that are pornographic.

who taught us this was normal? Who promoted it?

Much as I think the media fully deserves everything said against them, I can’t pin all the blame on the donkey, so to speak.

After all, who bought those televisions? Who turned them on? Who laughed at the shows? Who taught their kids it was all right?

I think its a testimony to my parents’ success in raising free thinkers that I to this day have different standards than the adults I know, concerning TV shows. But what if I did not think for myself?

It saddens me that things like The Hunger Games are so attractive to young people, because it tells me they are too used to little hope, little purpose, and low standards.

Now, I would not encourage people to be snobbish, I have been that, and I recognize now that it is also immature and small minded, but being snobbish is still better than having no standards beyond the Culture’s dictates.

But I will not say every show out there is bad. You all know I like some of them myself. But I am concerned that our focus is on the wrong thing, like who we ship. (If you’re unfamiliar with the term ship, it means who should be with who romantically, and some people use it as a friendship thing.) Or who we like. Or how funny it is. But we aren’t asking what the real message is, and if we should find it funny.

There will always be those who think I am a prude for thinking this way, but if I go by what the Word says, than I can never be too careful.

Here are my fallback verses whenever I start to weaken in my belief that high standards are a good thing.

“I will behave wisely in a perfect (blameless) way… I wills et nothing wicked before my eyes. I hate the work  of those who fall away; it shall not cling to me. A perverse heart shall depart from me; I will not know wickedness.” Psalm 101: 2-3

When the Bible uses the word know, it means experience, or know deeply, to get inside someone’s head, or soul really. Too many characters in entertainment are used to get us inside the head of evil. That is what they are designed to do.

My other passage to go to is this:

“The lamp of the body is the eye. If therefore your eye is good (clear or healthy,) your whole body will be full of light.

“But if your eye is bad (evil or unhealthy,) your whole body will be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in  you is darkness, how great is that darkness!” Matthew 6:22-23.

When I looked up the above passage, I found a bunch of articles about how our eyes actually are a giveaway of how we’re feeling, what kind of personality we have, and how healthy we are. Seriously, look it up, it’s cool.

science always caches up with the Bible eventually. But most of us have looked into other people’s eyes and seen something about them.

Just like everything else about us, the eyes don’t set our personality in stone, they only indicate what choice we are making now.

And what we watch is what fills our minds. Especially what we’re focusing on as we’re watching.

I’ll leave it at that. Until next time–Natasha.

The Hunger Games.

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This is going to be a review post.

It may surprise a few people that until last week, I’ve never seen or read the Hunger Games. At least in my limited scope of things, it seems like that series was what kicked off the post apocalyptic trend in teen fiction. If you’ve read some of my previous posts you know how I view that, so needless to say the idea of The Hunger Games never exactly thrilled me.

I also never could understand why it was my 11 or 12 year old friend who first told me about them; and how great the books were. Man, if I had a dime for every time someone my age told me this or that was good and I thought they were out of their mind.

But over the years I heard more intriguing things about the series, so my sister and I decided to finally check it out and our dad sat in for some of it. (We didn’t ask him to, but he was curious.)

So, as we like to ask each other, what’s the verdict?

Well, to like this movie, I would have had to be surprised, it would have had to be different than I expected. But it wasn’t.

That’s not to say I expected it to be completely bad. There were a lot of good moments. Katniss saving her sister, Katniss and Rue (almost tears,) Katniss and Peeta making their big decision. Katniss grieving over Rue was more than I expected, and it brought a lot of humanity to her. Rue’s brother or relative saving Katniss was kind of cool.

And despite all the hate Peeta gets, I don’t see why he deserves it, but I’ve only seen the one movie.

So, after admitting all this was good, why wouldn’t I give this movie a thumbs up. I am one to find meaning in anything I can.

Which I do. But There are those who find meaning, and there are those who find a meaning that was clearly never supposed to be there, or if it was  it was the wrong meaning.

You see, it is hard enough to find a movie with any attempt at a good message, but it is harder to find one that even knows how to communicate its message.

At the end of “The Hunger Games.” I can’t really tell what the message was. It wasn’t about going against the culture, whatever Peeta thinks. It wasn’t about risking your life to save someone else, whatever Katniss’es original intent might have been. I guess, from what the scary guy with the white beard was saying, the movie is supposed to be about hope.

You all know how much I like hope.

And that is my huge problem with this movie and every movie like it. Hope is very, very slim. Hope is nearly given up. Hope lies in running for your life and then starting a rebellion. And I’m not even certain what part of what Katniss and Peeta did was meant to give me hope. They both started off willing to kill, steal, and destroy each other and their competition. This is supposed to make me like them?

I know Katniss wanted to save her sister, but doing bad things for you family used to be frowned upon; and it still would be in a different movie.  No one would question it then. Like Luke, should he have gone over to the Dark side to make his father happy?

It may seem like a completely different circumstance, but it’ not. Peeta had no such noble reason for being in the Hunger games at all.

I am glad Katniss killed no one who did not attack her first, but neither did she at any time declare it was wrong to do so. She did not stand up to the government till the very end, and then it was almost too late, everyone else had died.

But on top of all that, the whole idea of the Hunger games is highly disturbing. no one ever talks about it when they discuss the movies’ merits, but what kind of person thinks up such an idea, and what kind of parents in the future would allow their children to be taken without a fight? Gale at least wants to run away, why hasn’t that idea been adopted ages ago? I’d expect it to be a reoccurring problem by the time Katniss goes. (If it is in the second movie, then my apologies, I haven’t seen it.)

Really. Why do parents let their children watch this movie anyway? My sister and I are older teens, but our younger sibling wasn’t watching, and good thing too. Like I said, a 12-year-old first recommended this to me. Am I the only one who sees a problem with this?

Unfortunately, I usually am the only one who does.

As for the theme of hope, I want to know why we are satisfied with so little. We are given barely any to go on, we are shown precious little positive change because of that hope. Yet for this we are to be happy and feel inspired?

I think C. S. Lewis nailed the problem with most of mankind when he said “We are far too easily pleased.” (The Weight of Glory.)

We all talk about being exceptional, but we don’t recognize that exceptional people are not satisfied with small ideas, small goals, and small hopes. Things have come to a sad pass when I need to watch a movie about children murdering each other in order to feel related to and get inspiration.

And that’s my verdict. The Hunger Games is, in a sense, lowering the bar. I am perfectly aware I will make tons of people furious by saying so, and if it were deserved, I might mind. But though the movie has all the appearance of goodness, it is not actually good.

It has good acting, amazing scenery, and a fine score, it is moving in some ways; but none of that makes it good. It just makes it easier to mistake it for good. I almost would have too, but when it was over I realized that despite feeling horrified by what I saw, I was left with no lasting, strong impression of any injustice that I could have righted, or any improvement I could have made, all I was left with was the characters, and they didn’t inspire me.

I am sorry to have to upset so many people, but that is my honest take on it. However there is one lesson to draw from the movie, and I’m going to cover that in part two.

Until then–Natasha.

Great Examples, Poor Solutions.

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I notice people seem to like reading about superheroes, and that’s great, because so do I. They are an interesting subject.

Though if I’m not mistaken, superheroes are a development of the past 50-60 years, which is an extremely short time in the grand scope of things.

I wonder why that is, the idea of superheroes is such an instant win among the old and young alike, why is it so recent?

The answer just occurred to me as I was writing the above, it’s because superheroes are a new type of an old idea.

The idea that there could be beings like humans, only with more power, more goodness, more courage.

And from this naturally springs the idea that there could be beings similar to that, but evil instead of good, and the good and evil would fight each other.

The strange thing is that no matter what form this idea had taken, whether of ancient Greek and Roman gods; or the spirits of tribal religions; or just the elements themselves having a form and personality; the inevitable theme of these good and evil beings fighting for control of mankind is introduced.

Why is that?

And are superheroes really a new thing in that sense? People love them because there are few story forms that make the battle between good and evil seem more epic than a superhero form does.

People become crazily enamored of  supers, to the point where it is hardly even fiction to them anymore. They even try to be in that world as much as possible. Via fan fiction, fan clubs, and the catch phrases.

“I know all your moves; your crime fighting style; favorite catch phrases; everything! I am your number one fan!” (Buddy to Mr. Incredible.)

Poor Buddy.

But what happens to him? If you’ve seen The Incredibles, than you know Buddy gets rejected by his hero, and it leads him to become a villain, which is cliché, but it works in this film because Buddy literally wanted to be Mr. Incredible’s sidekick. Buddy bitterly says that “You can’t count on anyone, especially your heroes.”

Am I the only one noticing that the fan–superhero relationship is slowly becoming a love–hate one?

It’s like, dare I say, we are disillusioned. More and more movies are exploring the weaknesses of being superheroes, the Batman films are especially dark.

On the other hand, there are those who remain fiercely loyal despite the growing moral dilemma attached to even having supers exist. Explored, ironically, by The Incredibles, and later Captain America: Civil War, and I’m sure you could think of a few others, even Justice League Unlimited got into it.

The conclusion always is, we need superheroes, because we have super villains. But maybe it is too much to hope that our supers will remain heroes on their own, as Civil War suggests.

I am not necessarily against that movie or any of these movies, on the contrary, I love The Incredibles. That movie makes a pretty good case for having supers, without idolizing them.

Still…

In my personal experience, the action and adventure of the superhero genre is awesome, and you want more and more, but when it comes time to reflect on it and evaluate what you saw, finding the point can be difficult.

I’m well aware, not everyone cares. Particularly the people who don’t like the genre that much. but I suspect the reason they don’t like it is because it often has no clear cut message.

But I do care about there being a point. And it bugs me when the screenwriters aren’t really sure of what they are saying.

The same problem occurs every time. There’s a huge conflict, a lot of tension for the protagonist, the villain makes an evil speech about their depressing world view; and very rarely now does the hero make any comeback except a one liner.

Does anyone else notice it often seems like the hero doesn’t even know what they think, just that they need to defeat the bad guy?

There’s a clear message here, evil is complex, good is simplistic.

Well, maybe good is simple, but that doesn’t mean it should be vague.

In the end, it’s just the heroes view against the villains, and the normal civilians have no perspective at all, they just go with whichever side. We want the hero to win, but we enjoy the villain just as much.

I could start naming names, but it is unnecessary and I’ll only make somebody mad. But I’m sure examples came to mind.

What is so scary to me is that I could bring up this point and get absolutely no concern from the person I was taking to.

Are good and evil equal? No.

It is true, we still want good to win; but we are diving deeper and deeper into evil, because it takes more and more to make us afraid, to get our hearts pounding, to make us feel the suspense.

What was horror back in the sixties is laughable now.

Evil has not changed, but the amount of it we willingly expose ourselves to has.

This is not to knock superhero fiction, I think it can be awesome, but it is not awesome when the heroes are shown less and less respect.

On a final note, people grow disillusioned with supers because they are not perfect, but they seemed to be, at their conception. The Superman of the fifties and sixties had no faults. It was annoying.

Supers may be, as my dad says, the ultimate humanistic ideal…but the ideal is unattainable.  The supers themselves cannot hold to it even in our imaginations. We are looking for something in supers that is not there.

They are great examples, but very poor solutions. They break down under that kind of pressure.

I still have my favorites, but my days of obsession are over. I’ve found a new obsession.

It seems to me that the genre of supers has declined because we are less hopeful than we used to be, instead of overwhelming victory, as supers used to have, there is a struggle that nearly ends in favor of the villain, until the last possible moment.

But as moving as that can be, it is rare in real life. I prefer to have more hope than that.

And I do hope you got something out of this, until next time–Natasha.

Do Your Worst. (Part 3.)

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Continued from part 2…

So, I’ve covered a problem with our attitude towards the real and the imagined, and the problem with not showing mercy. There is one last piece of this I want to put into place, and this is where the title comes in.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Shirira Hall struggled with feeling guilty long after the whole thing was over. It’s not like anyone let her forget it either, even if she had tried.

It’s because of this that I really started to feel sorry for her. Real or not, it breaks my heart when people cannot forgive themselves. I have seen it enough in real life to know how destructive it is, and to feel it myself.

I actually have a difficult time forgiving myself if I feel I’ve really done something that was intentionally wrong.

The things is, I have been tempted to wallow in guilt. To let it make me miserable, because then I won’t want to do the bad thing again, and I know people who embrace that way of thinking.

And then there are those who shrug off guilt way too easily and ought to dwell on it a little longer.

But guilt has never set me or anyone else free of their fault. It actually weakens me, I have less resistance to sin when I feel guilty, because if you feel like crud, you act like crud. But if you feel like a million bucks, you act like a million bucks.

The worst of it is, when you live in constant guilt, you lose you ability to tell when someone is guilt tripping you unfairly, and you don’t know whether you’ve truly done wrong, or whether they have misconstrued it so that they think you have.

The way I see it, that is what happened to Shirira, she did do a lot of bad things, but she made unbelievably hard choices in order to do t e right things, and she was criticized for doing it, until she didn’t know herself. She, quite sadly, started to wonder  if she was destined to betray her friends.

As far fetched as her example might seem, is it really any different form us? How may of us have started to feel like we are doomed to fail, to bring unhappiness, to let people down? I know I have felt that way in the past.

But I am no longer laboring under that kind of guilt. I broke free. So it is possible.

I have often wished that there was a way to change the show so Hawk Girl found peace with herself, because it might have helped people.

But this is the best I can do at using her story for good. And it still works, because we know what should have been.

She should have been forgiven. She should have been shown kindness by more people. She should not have been constantly reminded of her mistakes.

And if you find yourself in a similar situation, rest assured, it is not right. You do not “deserve it.”

The truth is, we all deserve such treatment from God. But not from each other. None of us are sinless, or anywhere near good enough to have the right to judge each other to that extent. If God can show mercy, (He delights in it, according to the Bible,) then we sure as heck have no right to complain that it’s not fair. Like Jonah did,

I always feel sorry for Jonah when I read his last words, how could he have missed what God was doing so much as to wish to die? Yet it is possible to be so full of hate that you’d rather die than see your hated people live. You’d rather drag them down than be lifted up. It’s very sad.

I trust no one reading this has that problem, but if they do, God can fix it. I recommend reading what He tells Jonah, it is little quoted, but it tells something of how God views mercy.

Mercy triumphs over judgment, every time. Mercy has a miraculous effect on people, it has made hardened killers sob, it has made people on the brink of suicide find a new reason to live, it has broken the pride of the proud who judge people unfairly.

Mercy has made the fearful find the courage to be brave.

Mercy can take the red out of your ledger. (Avengers reference.)

Mercy is the first attribute of Love that we recognize as such.

And, it’s not actually that hard to get, if you just ask. But ask the right Person.

One more thing, those who know they need mercy have a lot easier time receiving it. They won’t make such a complicated mess out of believing. They respond the quickest.

And while there are other ways of finding the truth, the path of mercy may be the simplest.

But, like Shirira, if you get too deep in the mire, it can be difficult to believe there is any way out. And that’s the whole point of this post. There is a way out.

You can do your worst, and still be forgiven. And I want everyone to keep in mind that we all have done our worst, and most of us have been forgiven even by people, so we have no call not to extend that forgiveness. Though it is not easy; it has often been a long fight for me to be able to do it. But it’s really about making it a priority. The rest follows.

Okay, I think that wraps up this series. Thanks for reading, and until next time–Natasha.

 

…turn to color all around…
all is new….this is lving now!

Click on pictures for captioning.

Do Your Worst (Part 2.)

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Okay, continuing from part 1…

So, as I have already covered, there is an attitude toward both real and imaginary people that is very harsh, and it is very prevalent.

But I recognize that I may be the only one who thinks it is a problem. So I am now going to dive into this question: Is it deserved?

Specifically, do these both real and unreal people deserve to be spoken of, cursed, and held a grudge against, in this manner?

What makes this question important even for the made up characters is that many of them do things that real people have done, so we have something to compare them to.

I’m going to go back to Hawk Girl, a. k. a. Shirira, what exactly did she do?

Well, she lied. But that is hardly enough, we all have lied. What makes hers worse, so we think, is that she lied to her friends, multiple times. About who she was, why she was there, and what her own people planned to do.

To be fair, the last one she didn’t know herself and lied more than she thought.

We might jump on that and say, she should have found out what her own people were really planning. Ignorance is no excuse.

It may be no excuse, but all of us have been ignorant and I daresay we acted upon what we thought, instead of what we knew.

So far, I see nothing that overwhelmingly wrong in what she did.

But it turned more serious, she helped her own people defeat her friends, telling them what their weaknesses were, so they could be exploited. She did nothing to stop them from hunting them down. She sucker punched the guy who she’d claimed to be in love with. After asking him to trust her. Not to mention that she’d never told him she was already engaged.  Not that she could be absolutely certain that was going to be a problem since it had been five years with no word from her own people.

All this is pretty bad. On top of it all, she was betraying the whole planet of Earth, almost leading to its destruction. This was heavy stuff.

But as bad as it was, Hawk Girl was never the callous kind of betrayer. She felt guilty for everything.

And I never blamed her for wanting to believe in her own people, who wouldn’t?

It was a tough call, because if they didn’t destroy earth, their enemies would destroy them.

At one memorable moment in the film, Hawk Girl is angrily arguing with her old fiancé, Ro, and cries “So we just trade their lives for our own? That’s not right.” Or something like that.

In a word, Shirira is talking about Honor. Earth is full of life, and its people have no quarrel with the Gordanians, they are not in the war. They were duped. There is no excuse at all for, as she says, for committing this kind of holocaust. Even thought Thanagarians do face extinction by letting Earth survive, it was their fight, their risk, and their choice. We never find out how the war started or who was at fault, but it is certain that the technologically advanced Thanagarians could have had other options, had they not been such a barbaric society. They waited too long, but that was their own fault.

There is no country on earth that could substitute another into its war to be killed in its stead, thank goodness, and I think because of that it is difficult to realize how horrible the idea is. But Shirira did, the reason she was conflicted was because these were her people, how could she turn on them?

She does the same thing to them that she did to the Justice League, but she tells Green Lantern “I did what I thought was right then, which is what I’m doing now.”

I wish I could say that Shirira at least never regretted her choice, but she did. Not enough to unmake it, but she felt horribly guilty and to make matters worse, many people, even in the Justice League, kept ribbing her on it. Eventually she got to the point where she didn’t even want to hear about forgiveness because it was too painful. She got flack for not being able to be loyal to anyone.

I just shake my head, these people entirely missed the point.

Honestly, I think the people writing the series missed the point.

Shirira messed up, but she was listening to her conscience the entire time, and ultimately she did the right thing. She lost her people, you’d think a smidgen of sympathy would be possible. Just a little bit, but it never occurred to anyone to put themselves in her place. Except Superman, I liked him better for that.

And outside the DC universe, what about in real life? Does it ever occur to anyone that these are real people we’re talking about? Who have real feelings, who go through the same things we do, and maybe they made the wrong choice, or maybe they didn’t, but could we just put ourselves in their shoes for one second?

I don’t mean to rant.

Look, I have my beliefs about Mercy, and I know many people do not, but two things Jesus said about it sum up the reason it is important to me. “Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy,” and “Judge not lest you be judged.”

I want to be shown mercy for my many faults, and I do not want to be judged, so I need to be merciful and not judge other people. Christians are famously accused of being judgmental, but from what I’ve seen, non Christians are every bit as judgmental, if not more.

Who is leaving those hate comments or hate mail; who is blasting those political people; or the opposing side? Yes, Christians do that, but it would be delusional to say all or even most of the culprits are Christian.

And it is not my intent to point fingers, I just mean we all do this. Few people are born merciful. But we all need it, and we all need to learn it.

There is one more thing I want to talk about concerning this, so watch out for part three,

Until next time–Natasha