The Stand
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Sanrith Descartes
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I always saw him as the Devil. The survivors were the minions of God who have free will to choose good or evil and chose good.
Breakdown
Gunnar Durden
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Isn’t it crazy that the Whoopi who started Live Aid with Billy Crystal and Robin Williams became who she is? Those three truly believed in comedy and nothing was taboo. They bushes boundaries. Now she’s an old woke cunt. Thank god Billy stays in hiding and Robin is dead so I didn’t have to see them end up eaten by the left.
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TJT
Mr. Poopybutthole
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The big evil of the King-Verse or Dark Tower Universe is always The Crimson King. I get that most people probably haven't read all of King's stuff. So yeah, in the context of The Stand as an individual novel Flagg is very nebulous.
Even in the grander series, Flagg may be a terrible individual but he was never really human anyway. His goals are actually the same as The Gunslinger's.
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Tranny Chaser
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I wouldn't get too tied up in King's meta-verse. He emptied his own ass all over it himself over the course of finishing up the Dark Tower which itself shit the bed and then double shit the bed with the movie adaptation.
As far as The Stand goes he's our adversary but even as far back as 1978 he's got the same basic problem most King villains have - themselves. Honestly I find the entire cast of antagonists in that story to be pitiable. Flagg doesn't know what he is or why he is. He sets out to create something new when creation is the opposite of his nature. He's fated from beginning to fail and could do nothing else. We watch his reign crumble with no interference from our heroes. His power flickers, his sight dims and his people abandon him.
Harold starts out as your creepy fat beta orbiter but you spend so much of the middle part of the book with him that he becomes sympathetic. We start to see him improve. He starts getting in to shape and making friends. The people he works with actually like him. He picks up a nickhame, Hawk. Initially he thinks it's another cruel joke but it isn't. Just as he's starting to find himself a place in Boulder Nadine drops in and offers to be his obedient subservient "literally anything but the pussy go ahead use your imagination yes that too" at his beck and call 24/7 fucktoy. Even then up until the very point of no return we see Harold almost pull it all back. He almost does the right thing but in the end falls. As he flees Boulder with Nadine Flagg betrays him and he commits suicide on a lonely stretch of turnpike with two shattered legs. His suicide note reads "I was misled."
Trashcan Man is the most curious of all. He's the hero of the story yet despised by Mother Abigail. "Weasels in the corn" she says to him in a vision as he travels past her farm. He suffered from disabilities as a youth, watched his father get gunned down by the sheriff who would then marry his widowed mother. Starting fires eventually got him sent up to an asylum where he was sexually abused and subjected to electroshock therapy before returning home to be the perpetual joke of the town. Eventually while in Vegas he wigs out and sabotages the entire planned attack on Boulder that the book has been building to. He kills every single pilot Flagg has. Every single one. He torches their equipment. He then goes out to the desert, finds a nuke, brings it back to Las Vegas and the literal Hand of God detonates it. The end. Trash is the fucking MVP. He does more than anyone else to protect Boulder and to such a degree that it renders the actions of everyone else irrelevant. Fuck Stu, Ralph, Larry and Glenn's big walk across the country to confront Flagg. They don't do shit. Stu breaks his leg and doesn't make it. Glenn gets shot. Ralph and Larry get vaporized. What a pack of heroes. They sure overcame our dastardly Randall Flagg.
All those people that sided with Flagg? Vaporized. We're not shown that anyone involved in the day to day operations is a bad person. There's an eight year old boy in Vegas. People take turns caring for him. Vaporized. Even fucking Lloyd is a man to be pitied and we're introduced to him and his crazy partner gunning people down in a diner. I still feel bad for him by the end. It's one big pile of sad characters waiting around to get nuked by a God that I wouldn't want anything to do with.
I do like the book though.
As far as The Stand goes he's our adversary but even as far back as 1978 he's got the same basic problem most King villains have - themselves. Honestly I find the entire cast of antagonists in that story to be pitiable. Flagg doesn't know what he is or why he is. He sets out to create something new when creation is the opposite of his nature. He's fated from beginning to fail and could do nothing else. We watch his reign crumble with no interference from our heroes. His power flickers, his sight dims and his people abandon him.
Harold starts out as your creepy fat beta orbiter but you spend so much of the middle part of the book with him that he becomes sympathetic. We start to see him improve. He starts getting in to shape and making friends. The people he works with actually like him. He picks up a nickhame, Hawk. Initially he thinks it's another cruel joke but it isn't. Just as he's starting to find himself a place in Boulder Nadine drops in and offers to be his obedient subservient "literally anything but the pussy go ahead use your imagination yes that too" at his beck and call 24/7 fucktoy. Even then up until the very point of no return we see Harold almost pull it all back. He almost does the right thing but in the end falls. As he flees Boulder with Nadine Flagg betrays him and he commits suicide on a lonely stretch of turnpike with two shattered legs. His suicide note reads "I was misled."
Trashcan Man is the most curious of all. He's the hero of the story yet despised by Mother Abigail. "Weasels in the corn" she says to him in a vision as he travels past her farm. He suffered from disabilities as a youth, watched his father get gunned down by the sheriff who would then marry his widowed mother. Starting fires eventually got him sent up to an asylum where he was sexually abused and subjected to electroshock therapy before returning home to be the perpetual joke of the town. Eventually while in Vegas he wigs out and sabotages the entire planned attack on Boulder that the book has been building to. He kills every single pilot Flagg has. Every single one. He torches their equipment. He then goes out to the desert, finds a nuke, brings it back to Las Vegas and the literal Hand of God detonates it. The end. Trash is the fucking MVP. He does more than anyone else to protect Boulder and to such a degree that it renders the actions of everyone else irrelevant. Fuck Stu, Ralph, Larry and Glenn's big walk across the country to confront Flagg. They don't do shit. Stu breaks his leg and doesn't make it. Glenn gets shot. Ralph and Larry get vaporized. What a pack of heroes. They sure overcame our dastardly Randall Flagg.
All those people that sided with Flagg? Vaporized. We're not shown that anyone involved in the day to day operations is a bad person. There's an eight year old boy in Vegas. People take turns caring for him. Vaporized. Even fucking Lloyd is a man to be pitied and we're introduced to him and his crazy partner gunning people down in a diner. I still feel bad for him by the end. It's one big pile of sad characters waiting around to get nuked by a God that I wouldn't want anything to do with.
I do like the book though.
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Chukzombi
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eh the bad guys were actually just normal people trying to get their lives back. they were deemed evil because they wanted arms to protect themselves. it took me years to realize what a bunch of hippie losers the good guys were. flagg is just the defacto big baddie. im surprised he wasnt in The Talisman. i bet Straub picked Sloat.
Sevens
Log Wizard
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Been years and years since I read this,
Isn't this the huge book about a plague that goes on forever but at the end a dude shows up with a nuke and kills everyone?
I remember when I read the book I got the feeling that King was writing this huge story in a fevered pitch but after several months just grew tired of it and was like "fuck it, drop a nuke on everyone."
Isn't this the huge book about a plague that goes on forever but at the end a dude shows up with a nuke and kills everyone?
I remember when I read the book I got the feeling that King was writing this huge story in a fevered pitch but after several months just grew tired of it and was like "fuck it, drop a nuke on everyone."
Chukzombi
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it lasted a few months and it killed everyone it was going to kill. the nuke just killed everyone in vegas because King isnt a good enough writer to get himself out of the corner he painted himself in.
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Tranny Chaser
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Given that a big big chunk of the book is building towards a military conflict (that never, ever happens) I wonder if he was planning to have one and chickened out.
Chukzombi
Millie's Staff Member
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it was, the problem King created was that the "good" guys were hippie assholes and they were already bitching and moaning because their shitty little hippie commune needed a single police officer. one of Fran's(?) little speeches was that once they go down the slippery slope of law enforcement, then it would in no time lead to the big government making wars and nukes and more super flus. King shot himself in the foot because you cant have an armed militia of peaceniks waging war with the Vegas shitlords who were mostly hardened ex military and techies who were grabbing all the milspec hardware they could in Nevada in preparation to curbstomp the "Boulder Free Community" in the spring. then you add that the Boulder fags had a shitty lv 15 Druid on their side while the Vegas crew had a high end equipped lv 60 Necro leading the way. those hippies would have been slaughtered in 20 minutes and the women would have been impregnated with shitlord DNA by the weekend.
so what do? King introduced the "finger of God" to write away his huge plothole. 15 yr old me thought it was awesome. old fart me thinks it a big fucking copout.
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I'm With HER ♀
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watched the first episode. so basically following the book but adding a lot of time skipping back and forth, focusing and adding a lot on Harold and less on Fran and Stu for some reason, and changing the setting to a more contemporary one and not 1980s. Whoopie Goldberg as Abigail. no blue oyster cult intro. M-O-O-N, that spells "worse than the original".
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Sanrith Descartes
Veteran of a thousand threadban wars
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They should just take the first like 45 minutes to an hour of the original Stand and splice it to the first season of Walking Dead. Insta-emmy right there.
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Tranny Chaser
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So for episode one -
I don't know if the whole season is going to be the same way but the non-linear storytelling did this episode no favors. The fun part about apocalyptic fiction is the build up to the collapse and then the collapse itself. By having the first scene of the show be about the clean up crew in Boulder we've sabotaged the show's ability to build tension. This episode is mostly about Harold with some of his stuff from the second half of the book and it's just wrong for the first episode. There's some neat bits hidden here or there and there's some money on the screen in spots but overall I can't see this selling regular folks on watching more. The first hour of the original TV movie is better and some of the strongest stuff in the book (everything going to shit in the beginning) isn't there.
The original series gets kinda lame as it goes on so there's plenty of opportunity for this show to end up the better adaptation but that is not the case so far.
I don't know if the whole season is going to be the same way but the non-linear storytelling did this episode no favors. The fun part about apocalyptic fiction is the build up to the collapse and then the collapse itself. By having the first scene of the show be about the clean up crew in Boulder we've sabotaged the show's ability to build tension. This episode is mostly about Harold with some of his stuff from the second half of the book and it's just wrong for the first episode. There's some neat bits hidden here or there and there's some money on the screen in spots but overall I can't see this selling regular folks on watching more. The first hour of the original TV movie is better and some of the strongest stuff in the book (everything going to shit in the beginning) isn't there.
The original series gets kinda lame as it goes on so there's plenty of opportunity for this show to end up the better adaptation but that is not the case so far.
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I'm With HER ♀
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agree, the strength of stephen kings books in general are the beginning slow and steady build-ups, so it's really weird that they try and skip around and mess that whole part up.
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Chukzombi
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i forget when we see Harold for the first time. was he mowing his lawn in his underwear or something? when Fran starts being nice to him, he assumes that means she's his girlfriend and then he gets all salty when he finds out she was just being nice to him. did they really not start the show that way? or Larry Underwood and his mom or Nick Andros getting almost killed? thats a bunch of shit right there.
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I'm With HER ♀
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they haven't even introduced Larry or Nick in the show yet. Only Stu, Fran, Harold and a little bit of Flagg. and yeah they start it with Harold cleaning bodies in the zone, then time skip back to Fran and Harold becoming the only ones left alive in their town and then forward to Fran being preggers and Harold writing his manifesto that he wants to kill stu. with stu it starts out with him being held in detention facility and brief flashbacks to the gas station and then him escaping.
Chukzombi
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lol thats gay. Stu is the most boring main character of this story and he isnt even a writer or a teacher. King is so corny, he wanted a Texas character so he names him Stu Redman, like the chewing tobacco he assumes every texan chews 24/7.