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The Blog of Mazarbul Posts

Wait what…was Reva’s plan in ‘Obi-Wan Kenobi’?

I didn’t much enjoy Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi, alas.  I thought there was some good stuff in it…I liked pretty much all the actors and their performances.  I especially thought the interplay between Ewan MacGregor and Hayden Christiansen worked well and both actors really added to the show, and actually really liked Vivien Lyra Blair’s performance as Leia (though the writing for her character was super uneven), and thought that the concept of her and Obi-Wan having shared a prequel adventure together actually held up well. I didn’t think it was terribly distinctive or striking visually, though.  The score was, I…

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Durin VII, Reincarnation, and the Beautiful Dwarvish Long Defeat

I was flicking through the Appendices of LOTR the other day, on an unrelated mission, when something really curious caught my eye in the Dwarvish genealogy tree.  It’s a really small detail, almost insignificant – but the more I thought about it, the more it intrigued me, and the more intrigued I became, the more I realised that it’s actually a whole lot of details all packaged up in a single detail. Namely, Durin VII.  When was he born?  When did he reign?  And, perhaps most pressingly, how did he obtain that epithet? From the perspective of Tolkien as author,…

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Gwen Stacy & The Hero’s Journey In Across The Spider-Verse

Ever since I saw Across the Spider-Verse, I’ve been really interested in the journey that Gwen Stacy undergoes in the film.  I’ve already talked about the hubris of Miles, Miguel, and even the Spot, and how this is a core thematic element of the story – but Gwen’s very much got her own thing going on.  So I figured I’d try and break it down a little here, with the help of one Joseph Campbell and a certain infamous narrative template – but I’m getting ahead of myself. A central plot point of Across the Spider-Verse is the idea of…

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“I (don’t) see you” – Why couldn’t Sauron find the Ring?

I seem to be making a habit of discussing Ring-lore on this blog, which is wholly unintentional – but I came across a brief passage that intrigued me, that I’ve never properly noticed before, and that is entirely relevant to yet another misconception (exaggerated by the films) concerning the Ring. It’s a relatively typical line of fan inquiry to ask why Sauron never ‘spotted’ Gollum or Bilbo while they wore the Ring, or why Frodo himself is only truly seen right at the end of his quest, when he claims the Ring for himself at the Crack of Doom. A…

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Wait what…was Grindelwald doing in the American Ministry for Magic?

Wait what?…is an ongoing series on this blog that asks the little and niggling questions that draw you out of a sub-created world. Whether it’s a plot hole, a logical inconsistency, or simply a character acting completely out of turn, if it makes you ask wait, what?…then it’s fair game for this series. This is the ‘wait what?’…moment that inspired this new blog series, and that (despite only having seen the film once, and years ago) still rattles around in my brain, appearing at inconvenient moments to distract me from more pressing matters, just because it’s so damn incongruous to…

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