Battle Angels Speaking Power to Truth With A Pinch of Tolkien On Speaking Truth To Power

The relationship between truth and power is very interesting and not at all straight-forward.

The need to lie, the incentive to lie generally betrays some sort of weakness rather than necessarily malice.

To put it bluntly if you are powerful enough to get away with anything then there would be no reason for you to lie.

Therefore to say that 'honesty is the best policy' - something that nobody believes but which almost everyone wants others to believe (hence why it is taught to children at a young age) - is to say that might is right.

To repeat myself for clarity's sake, only the powerful have the luxury of a clear conscience. The weak, even a dictatorship weak, needs to consistently lie or else face unplesant consequences.

The most persistent form of lying is that of the individual lying to the group. The group lies to the individual too but believes in its own lies more often than the individual.

On the one hand Internet has made this lying worse because at any time a righteous mob will materialize to extinguish original thought in the name of consensus by any other name.

On the other it has made it easier for individuals to self-segregate into groups that they can identify with and thus receive some backing from this partisan group against society(although there is no such thing as society).

Basically the individual is induced more and more to lie as he is the weakest unit in a group - and as industrialization has made groups bigger - the individual has gotten so much smaller. However the sub-groups that are more accepting of his peculiarities will indulge them further allowing them to grow.

Just as might is not right so too weakness isn't right either. To be honest I find ethical questions boring so let us leave them aside for the juicy-bits.

In the long term there is a symbiotic relationship between truth and power -but that isn't strictly true either. What I mean by this is that if an individual fakes being being powerful enough to always say the truth unscathed, if he acts as if he were free then eventually the group might be unable to deny its own lies and that individual will have altered the group slightly.

The more likely outcome however is that the individual will change his behaviour to conform to the group and thus not need to lie
Tolkien's Made in China Fantasy

The word 'fantasy' implies imagination however a large part of the fantasy genre may as well be called the Tolkien Fan Fiction genre.

The Chinese Wuxia web novels are a bit different from the standard fantasy, less elves, more martial arts but for the most part they are little more than primitive power fantasies where might is right ala Greek Mythology.
Battle Angel Alita is a Gary Stu Character

There is a certain scene in the first volume of Battle Angel Alita where Alita walks into a bar for bounty hunters and then proceeds to call the bounty hunters cowards for not volunteering to kill themselves by trying to kill a powerful criminal who was after Alita. We as the audience know that Alita has got a super body from mars which gives her plot armour and Alita may or may not be self-aware of this - so there is a little bit of dramatic irony at play here nevertheless it comes off as disingenuous.

This is the only place and maybe another where Alita acts more like Gary Stu than a Mary Sue character. Mary Sues exist only to be good - this is why Superman is boring - and so are all the feminist super heroes. Gary Stu characters on the other hand have other goals other than being good even though they are usually good.

Alita is a good manga. The adaptation is okay too - it looks very neat like a very intricate painting but it hasn't got enough action (although the action it has got is good) or a good enough plot to back it up.

The movie is a faithful adaptation of the setting of the manga and of Alita's character ( The doctor dad was okay too) but other than that I was not impressed. Nevertheless this was the most impressive western live action adaptation of a Japanese manga I have seen and I fear that it will not even make up the money it took to make it and the sequel bait at the end will be just that. Dr. Nova's character looked like a cosplayer lol.

The way that the manga was plotted made the time constraints of the movie worse. There is no proper overarching plot structure to the manga - to put it bluntly it feels like the writer is just making up the story as he goes taking random allies towards different locations but always retaining the same grim-dark sci-fi tone to it so that it doesn't feel like some parody suddenly.

Making up stuff along the way has the advantage of not feeling stale, of being experimental but sometimes it can feel whimsical. The sequel of the manga series felt more like a Shounen manga with tournaments and out of control power creep but the latest sequel seems to be a retconned origin story nevertheless unlike in American comics the author is always the same so there is enough stability for their to be continuity and enough randomness for their to be progress.