CaMP Anthropology | Communication, Media and Performance
Oliver L. Haimson, Ph.D.
Description: An anthropological approach to all things geek
Rings of Power fails to lean into the possibility of moral ambiguity, instead reproducing the same simplistic binaries between good and evil. For the Elves, the inherent “goodness” of their race, and their purpose on Middle Earth is eminently visible, communicated through the sheer beauty of their people, their clothes, their architecture, their relationship to nature. Even more disturbingly, Rings of Power also reinforces cultural narratives that equate deformity with evil through the character of Adar, a
Wanda tells us, again and again, “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother.” While recent endeavors into feminist horror have worked to critique this trope of mother monster, Wanda’s representation in Multiverse of Madness only serves to replicate this archetype—that there are good mothers and there are bad mothers, that women’s entire sense of identity and moral rectitude comes from their relationship to and orientation around reproduction and motherhood, and that one of the greatest threats to society, and indeed
Loki is a story about the hidden power of bureaucracy, bureaucracy’s capacity to conjure new realities through its administrative processes and even rewrite the flow of time through its minute, arcane, and often inaccessible managerial processes.
CaMP Anthropology | Communication, Media and Performance
Oliver L. Haimson, Ph.D.